Wit & Attitude Quote by Paracelsus

Paracelsus is doing something quietly radical here: he’s stealing alchemy away from the get-rich fantasy and rebranding it as a tool for care. In the early 1500s, “alchemy” still carried the stink of fraud and the seduction of courtly patronage: princes funded laboratories hoping for bullion, not better outcomes for the sick. By conceding what “many have said” and then pivoting hard to “For me,” Paracelsus stages a public break. It’s not modesty; it’s a declaration of jurisdiction. He gets to define the field’s purpose.

The key word is “virtue” - not moral virtue, but the active property inside a substance, the hidden efficacy that can be extracted, concentrated, and deployed. That’s the subtextual bridge between medieval occult correspondences and what starts to look like pharmacology: the belief that matter has specific powers that can be tested in the body, not merely contemplated in symbols. “Power” lands the same way: not metaphysical wonder, but actionable force.

Context matters because Paracelsus spent his career picking fights with medical orthodoxy, especially Galenic medicine and its bookish authority. He elevates “medicines” over metals as a kind of ethical flex: knowledge that serves life outranks knowledge that serves greed. There’s also self-mythmaking here. By casting himself as the alchemist who refuses gold, he turns experimental practice into a moral identity - a proto-scientific stance before “science” had stable borders. The line works because it’s both critique and pitch: alchemy, but with a patient on the table, not a prince at the door.