Universal Solvent Quotes

You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.

empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.

Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.

Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.

Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence.

Humor and wit are the universal solvents of the serious and the scholarly.

It used to be that each time you fell in love, the effort of loving released in you the energy to hold everything together a little longer. Then, after several months or years, when things began to crack apart again, you would fall in love with someone else. New energy would be released, and for a time you and your world would be safe once more. By now, however, you have exhausted that. There seems to be no energy left - if you had discovered alcohol earlier it might have saved a few broken hearts. For you, alcohol is not the problem - it's the solution: dissolving all the separate parts into one. A universal solvent. An ocean.

Liquid water is the universal solvent, the mixing bowl where the first DNA probably got off the ground. If liquid-water oceans are found on these planets, it could alter our understanding of life in the universe. Journalists in search of a scandal say, “Follow the money,” but astronomers searching for life in space say, “Follow the water.

In every drop of water live over one hundred thousand microbes, so, it is quite literally alive. It is the universal solvent, required for all life. It is the beginning of all things. Water is strong enough to wear down mountains but agile enough to move through the tiniest crevice. Your body is two-thirds water and every cell in it responds to that water.

The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will . . .

We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.

Astrobiologists now believe that the existence of life throughout the universe requires: 1. a source of energy; 2. a type of atom that allows complex structures to exist; 3. a liquid solvent in which molecules can float and interact; and 4. sufficient time for life to arise and to evolve.

Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal.

Each act of imagination, each moment of creative life stands up to the entire material universe and affirms the reality of meaning against the corroding solvents of entropy, dark matter, or whatever else may be dragging the physical world into oblivion.

DEX’S FAIL-PROOF ALCHEMY TIPS! (EVEN FOR YOU, SOPHIE!) TRUST THE DIZZNEE METHOD. WE’RE THE BEST! WHAP MEANS “WASH HANDS AND PRESENT.” (DO NOT “WHIP” THE ELIXIR INSTEAD! I KNOW YOU KNOW THIS, BUT IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD REMINDER.) ONLY PRACTICE ALCHEMY IN A FIREPROOF LOCATION. (WE, UH, BOTH KNOW WHY THIS ONE’S SO IMPORTANT.…) ALWAYS POUR IN AMARALLITINE FROM A SAFE DISTANCE—AND USE A TIMER TO ENSURE YOU’RE ADDING IT AT THE EXACT SECOND THE ELIXIR IS READY FOR IT. DON’T GET ANY RUCKLEBERRY JUICE ON YOUR SKIN—IT’LL MAKE YOU SMELL LIKE STINKY FEET. AND YOUR SKIN WILL GET ALL WEIRD AND WRINKLY LIKE FORKLE. YEAH, A LOT OF THE INGREDIENTS FOR ELIXIRS ARE SUPER DISGUSTING. IT’S PROBABLY BETTER IF YOU DON’T THINK ABOUT IT. (AND PLUG YOUR NOSE! ) REMEMBER: LADY GALVIN HATES EVERYBODY—IT’S NOT JUST YOU. (ALTHOUGH MAYBE TRY NOT TO DESTROY HER CAPE AGAIN?) ALKAHEST IS THE UNIVERSAL SOLVENT AND CAN ONLY BE STORED IN A BUBBLE OF ITSELF. (WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT TOUCH IT.) IF YOU BOTTLE QUINTESSENCE (ACCIDENTALLY OR ON PURPOSE), DO NOT BRING THE BOTTLE TO FOXFIRE. IF YOU SUDDENLY REMEMBER ANY COMPLICATED FORMULAS, DON’T TRY MAKING THEM. THE BLACK SWAN WAY OVERESTIMATED YOUR ALCHEMY SKILLS!

Vietnam was a universal solvent—the explanation for every evil we saw and the justification for every excess we committed. Trashing the windows of merchants on the main streets of America seemed warranted by the notion that these petty-bourgeois shopkeepers were cogs in the system of capitalist exploitation that was obliterating Vietnam. Fantasizing the death of local cops seemed warranted by the role they played as an occupying army in America’s black ghettos, those mini-Vietnams we yearned to see explode in domestic wars of liberation. Vietnam caused us to acquire a new appreciation for foreign tyrants like Kim Il Sung of North Korea.1 Vietnam also caused us to support the domestic extortionism and violence of groups like the Black Panthers, and to dismiss derisively Martin Luther King, Jr. as an “Uncle Tom.” (The left has conveniently forgotten this fact now that it finds it expedient to invoke King’s name

And this, too, is something that the pagans understood. Consider the word integrity. It does not mean sincerity; that and a really fine pumpkin patch won’t get you much. The man of integrity is integrated. He does not make his moral decisions ad hoc, reckoning up advantages, or gauging his feelings. He sees, too, that all of the virtues are related to one another, and are meant to inform the whole life of a man. He therefore would no more cheat a customer than he would commit adultery. He would no more lie under oath than he would flee from his post in time of war. He would no more spread rumors about his enemy than he would sprinkle rat poison upon a beggar’s dish. His honesty is brave; his chastity is generous; his great-heartedness is clean. But the divorce regime teaches and rewards dis-integrity. And one can no more build a great nation or even a good, solid town upon dis-integrated people, than one can build a town hall out of straw, or a church out of dust. Again, the evil principle is that the sexual gratification of adults must be met; no customs or laws may stand in its way. The principle is a universal solvent. Nothing can contain it.

She has confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that as burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says to see men and women - though, oddly, they mostly women - tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university's records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. all they want is for their to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.

I am, reluctantly, a self-confessed carbon chauvinist. Carbon is abundant in the Cosmos. It makes marvelously complex molecules, good for life. I am also a water chauvinist. Water makes an ideal solvent system for organic chemistry to work in and stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. But sometimes I wonder. Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact that I am made chiefly of them? Are we carbon- and water-based because those materials were abundant on the Earth at the time of the origin of life? Could life elsewhere—on Mars, say—be built of different stuff? I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. But the essence of life is not so much the atoms and simple molecules that make us up as the way in which they are put together. Every now and then we read that the chemicals which constitute the human body cost ninety-seven cents or ten dollars or some such figure; it is a little depressing to find our bodies valued so little. However, these estimates are for human beings reduced to our simplest possible components. We are made mostly of water, which costs almost nothing; the carbon is costed in the form of coal; the calcium in our bones as chalk; the nitrogen in our proteins as air (cheap also); the iron in our blood as rusty nails. If we did not know better, we might be tempted to take all the atoms that make us up, mix them together in a big container and stir. We can do this as much as we want. But in the end all we have is a tedious mixture of atoms. How could we have expected anything else? Harold Morowitz has calculated what it would cost to put together the correct molecular constituents that make up a human being by buying the molecules from chemical supply houses. The answer turns out to be about ten million dollars, which should make us all feel a little better. But even then we could not mix those chemicals together and have a human being emerge from the jar. That is far beyond our capability and will probably be so for a very long period of time. Fortunately, there are other less expensive but still highly reliable methods of making human beings. I think the lifeforms on many worlds will consist, by and large, of the same atoms we have here, perhaps even many of the same basic molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids—but put together in unfamiliar ways. Perhaps organisms that float in dense planetary atmospheres will be very much like us in their atomic composition, except they might not have bones and therefore not need much calcium. Perhaps elsewhere some solvent other than water is used. Hydrofluoric acid might serve rather well, although there is not a great deal of fluorine in the Cosmos; hydrofluoric acid would do a great deal of damage to the kind of molecules that make us up, but other organic molecules, paraffin waxes, for example, are perfectly stable in its presence. Liquid ammonia would make an even better solvent system, because ammonia is very abundant in the Cosmos. But it is liquid only on worlds much colder than the Earth or Mars. Ammonia is ordinarily a gas on Earth, as water is on Venus. Or perhaps there are living things that do not have a solvent system at all—solid-state life, where there are electrical signals propagating rather than molecules floating about. But these ideas do not

From science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is maya, illusion. Its mirages of reality all break down under analysis. As one by one the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his past transgression of the divine command: “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” In his famous equation outlining the equivalence of mass and energy, Einstein proved that the energy in any particle of matter is equal to its mass or weight multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The release of the atomic energies is brought about through the annihilation of the material particles. The ‘death’ of matter has been the ‘birth’ of an Atomic Age. Light-velocity is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute value in 186,000 miles a second, but because no material body, whose mass increases with its velocity, can ever attain the velocity of light. Stated another way: only a material body whose mass is infinite could equal the velocity of light. This conception brings us to the law of miracles. The masters who are able to materialise and dematerialise their bodies or any other object and to move with the velocity of light, and to utilise the creative light-rays in bringing into instant visibility any physical manifestation, have fulfilled the necessary Einsteinian condition: their mass is infinite. The consciousness of a perfected yogi is effortlessly identified, not with a narrow body, but with the universal structure. Gravitation, whether the ‘force’ of Newton or the Einsteinian ‘manifestation of inertia’, is powerless to compel a master to exhibit the property of ‘weight’ which is the distinguishing gravitational condition of all material objects. He who knows himself as the omnipresent Spirit is subject no longer to the rigidities of a body in time and space. Their imprisoning ‘rings-pass-not’ have yielded to the solvent: “I am He.

Grace is not a universal solvent to wash away God’s standards.

Why is coffee so valuable? isn't there other stuff in the, uh, multiverse, to find?"                 "Like what? Gold? There was enough gold and silver in the asteroid belt of your former solar system to make every house, car, building and road on Earth out of the stuff. Diamonds? shiny pebbles. Fiat currency? don't make me laugh. Utility is what creates value for the meta-traveler. Food, meta-vehicles, water, or at least whatever fluid solvent is necessary for continuing your biochemical reactions. Of these, the scarcest is good coffee. It rarely evolves, and only naturally evolved coffee has the right flavor. Only coffee grown in its native environment will please the palate. Few universes have the right cosmological constants and physical laws to even create good coffee. Good coffee only grows in narrow bands of subtropical climates and only at high elevations that aren't cold. Coffee is portable, dividable, consistent in mass, and quality can be tested with common olfactory senses. Every brew is a little different; the permutations of the coffee experience are endless. For most meta-traveling humanoid species, coffee is consistently satisfying. It is the only true currency."   *

The fact that large, solvent, heavily regulated banks would not lend to each other—or would lend to each other only at historically unprecedented interest rate premiums—and not lend to each other even overnight, was persuasive evidence, universally accepted by policymakers, that the crisis was essentially one of illiquidity.

On a physical level, water is often called the universal solvent because of its ability to dissolve almost anything at the molecular level. On a spiritual level it is the breath which acts as a universal solvent, because there is no trauma so great, no wound so deep, no delusion so convincing, that deep and mindful breathing will not dissolve it.

The ADAs say butter is bad? Then food manufacturers give you margarine for decades. But then . . . oops! Margarine contains trans fats, which are now universally recognized as poison. Alright, so they created a whole new line of synthetic "spreads" based on vegetable oils—formerly used as industrial machinery lubricants—extracted by heat and petroleum solvents that have to be deodorized to eat (mouth watering, isn’t it?).

Would to God I were rid of this nether millstone within me, this hateful body of death. Blessed be the name of the Lord, the disease is not incurable, the Saviour's precious blood is the universal solvent, and me, even me, it will effectually soften, till my heart melts as wax before the fire.

In ancient times, Southern and Eastern Christianity developed vernacular Christian literatures such as the Coptic and Slavonic; for the most part, Northern Christianity did not. Liturgy and Scriptures remained in Latin. The concept of a universal interconnected Christian body was thus strengthened, but at the risk of sacred language becoming exotic. The fact that Celt and Saxon alike used Latin may have helped to heal the breach between the Saxons missionized from Rome and the Celtic Christians whom the fathers of the missionized Saxons had suppressed. To Christianize was to Latinize, to bring people within the sphere of classical culture. In modern times, the Christianizing process in preliterate societies in the southern continents has similarly brought its recipients within the sphere of literary culture and international communication. But, in principle anyway, it has favoured the growth of vernacular literature. Original expectations that Latin, or some Western language, would serve for most important sacred purposes gave way to a recognition that Scripture and liturgy belonged to the vernacular, that the language of prayer is most properly the language of the home. The cultural effects of this are obvious; there are many instances of cultural renaissance caused by the growth of vernacular writing.3 The specifically Christian “sacred” use of the vernacular has given some primal cultures a resilience against the solvent of rapid change leading to loss of identity, and enabled a preservation of part of the local focus in the very act of producing a broader identity. There are also theological side effects. The explanation and elucidation of the Christian faith in one’s own vernacular, in dialogue with other vernacular speakers, is a wholly different matter from its recapitulation in an alien language of learned discourse, however correctly acquired.

He is … a depredator … not a worshipper of liberty … a Czar of plutocracy, a worshipper of his own Money Power over mankind. He will never sacrifice any of his plans for the restraints of law or patriotism or philanthropy.… His greed, rapacity, flow as a Universal solvent wherever they can, melting down into gold for him, private enterprise, public morals, judicial honor, legislative faith, gifts of nature. He will stop when he is stopped—not before. Not a tiger but a lynx … a make-up like that of the “gentleman pirate” of romance, think cold ruthless.

What sub-Lilliputian equivalents of the Fates of Greek mythology (one might fancifully ask) wove together our molecular destinies? Biological science, once hailed, with more than a little triumphalist glee, as the universal solvent of metaphysical beliefs, is now precisely the force which is making many reassess their philosophical materialism. Time and time again above, in simply following the evidence in the direction in which I judged it led, I have been obliged by the overwhelming force

In our own universe, the study of alchemy has run a parallel path to its magical counterpart. The goals of alchemy were the creation of an elixir of immortality; the synthesis of an alkahest, or universal solvent, and chrysopoeia—the transmutation of base metals into noble ones, particularly gold. There is little doubt that alchemy, practiced throughout Europe, Egypt, and Asia, played a major role in the creation of early modern science, and especially medicine and chemistry. But perhaps what’s not so well known is the fact that contemporary scientists have realized the dream of chrysopoeia. For, somewhere in the unfeasibly huge cosmos, base metal elements are slowly being transformed into gold.

Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.

Alchemists’ aims have varied through time and from place to place. Some of their best-known quests have included: changing “base” metals (common, ordinary, or inexpensive ones) such as lead, into precious metals, especially gold, using an object or formulation known as the Philosopher’s Stone; creating a substance that can dissolve any other substance—the Universal Solvent or Alkahest; inventing a potion that confers eternal youth on those who drink it—the Elixir of Life; producing a substance that can cure every disease and ailment—the Panacea or Universal Remedy.