Éliphas Lévi Quotes

“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!”