Éliphas Lévi Quotes

“Fear is nothing but idleness of the will.”

“Hermeticism is the science of nature hidden in the hieroglyphics and symbols of the ancient world. It is the search for the principle of life, along with the dream (for those who have not yet achieved it) of accomplishing the great work, that is the reproduction by man of the divine, natural fire which creates and recreates beings.”

“If you wish to seduce an angel, you must play the part of a devil.”

“Life accustoms us to death through sleep. Life warns us that there is another life through the dream.”

“Love is nothing but a desire and an enjoyment,it is mortal.”

“Magic is the divinity of man achieved in union with faith.”

“Passing beauties are only the fugitive reflections of the eternal. All beauty alters and all life melts away; in short, everything passes with marvelous rapidity.

Beautiful Helen of Troy has become a toothless skull, then a handful of dust, then nothing.”

“Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear you. Say to suffering, 'I will that you shall become a pleasure', and it will prove to be such – and even more than a pleasure, it will be a blessing.”

“There is nothing more to controlling demons than to do good and fear nothing.”

“To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself; to exist only for oneself is to damn oneself, and to exile oneself to hell.”

“What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.”

“When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's blood, one's life, one's intellegence, and one's reason, without ever satisfying them.”

“When we die, our interior light in departing follows the attraction of its star, and thus it is that we live in other universes, where the soul makes for itself a new garment, analogous to the development or diminution of its beauty; for our souls, when separated from our bodies, resemble revolving stars; they are globules of animated light which always seek their centre for the recovery of their equilibrium and their true movement.

Before all things, however, they must liberate themselves from the folds of the serpent, that is, the unpurified Astral Light (physical realm) which envelops and imprisons them, unless the strength of their will can lift them beyond its reach.”

“When we love, we see the infinite in the finite. We find the Creator in the creation.”

“Man's greatest wisdom is to choose his obsession well.”

“Weak people talk and do not act, strong people act and keep quiet.”

“All miracles are promised to faith, and what is faith except the audacity of will which does not hesitate in the darkness, but advances towards the light in spite of all ordeals, and surmounting all obstacles?”

“If Oedipus, instead of making the sphinx die, had tamed it and harnessed his chariot to enter Thebes, he would have been a king without incest, without calamities and without exile.”

“Showing the light to birds of the night is like hiding it from them, because it blinds them and becomes for them more obscure than darkness.”

“The provisional object of Christianity was to establish, by obedience and faith, a supernatural or religious equality among men, to immobilize intelligence by faith, so as to provide a fulcrum for virtue which came for the destruction of the aristocracy of science, or rather to replace that aristocracy, then already destroyed.

Philosophy, on the contrary, has laboured to bring back men by liberty and reason to natural inequality, and to substitute wits for virtue by inaugurating the reign of industry. Neither of these operations has proved complete or adequate; neither has brought men to perfection and felicity.

That which is now dreamed, almost without daring to hope for it, is an alliance between the two forces so long regarded as contrary, and there is good ground for desiring it, seeing that these two great powers of the human soul are no more opposed to one another than is the sex of man opposed to that of woman.

Undoubtedly they differ, but their apparently contrary dispositions come only from their aptitude to meet and unite.”

“To be able to do and to abstain from doing, is to be twice able.”

“To be sucked down by this whirling stream is to fall into abysses of madness, more frightful than those of death; to expel the shades of this chaos and compel it to give perfect forms to our thoughts – this is to be a man of genius; it is to create, it is to be victorious over hell!”

“A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.”

“it is not the fault of the form that does not fulfill the vague expectations of the formless which are always more phantasmagoric than their crystallized version.”

“Order is never observed; it is disorder which attracts attention because it is awkward and intrusive.”

“Christianity has been wrongly accused of taking over all that was beautiful in anterior forms of worship; it is the last transfiguration of universal orthodoxy, and as such it has preserved whatsoever belonged to it, while rejecting dangerous practices and idle superstitions.”

“Makers of curious experiments in phenomena of extranatural vision are no better than the eaters of opium and hasheesh. They are children who injure themselves recklessly.”

“When you love you don't reason. When you reason, it seems that you don't love yourself.

When one reasons after having loved, one understands why she loved herself. When you love after reasoning, you love better. Here is the path of the progress of souls.”

“Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act.”

“On the brink of mystery, the spirit of man is seized with giddiness. Mystery is the abyss which ceaselessly attracts our unquiet curiosity by the terror of its depth. The greatest mystery of the infinite is the existence of Him for whom alone all is without mystery.

Comprehending the infinite which is essentially incomprehensible, He is Himself that infinite and eternally unfathomable mystery; that is to say, that He is, in all seeming, that supreme absurdity in which Tertullian believed.”