Gnostic Quotes

I'm a Thelemite. I believe in Thelema, which is Crowley's so-called religion. There are some practitioners here who do something called the Gnostic Mass. I've been to that a few times, but basically, I'm a loner. I don't really need other people. ~ Kenneth Anger

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. ~ Carl Jung

Some Christians mistrust or de-emphasize the role of the senses in spirituality, considering them to be inferior to reason and cognition. Such a view fails to appreciate the indispensable part of human personhood the senses actually form. It falls into the gnostic error of denying human embodiment. Because Christians affirm the goodness of the physical body and believe in the physicality of the incarnation, we should also affirm the importance of encountering God through our senses. God gave us senses to enrich our lives. They are channels that can be spiritually tuned so as to register the traces of the divine that saturate the world . . . it could be the sight of a child, the sound of birds
singing, the smell of flowers or freshly cut grass, or the feeling of warmth. Any of these things-and many more-can serve as a call to pause and, even if just for a moment, turn our heart toward God. ~ David G. Benner

Conservatism is far from what I'm aiming at in proclaiming the establishment of a Sethian left-hand path tradition in the West as one of the first missions of the SLM. In fact, in establishing such a tradition, true to the spirit of sacred transgression and holy subversion that is essential to both Seth and the left-hand path, we are opening a door that enlightens through endangerment, that awakens through risk and peril: this is a radical (from Latin radix, root, implying how deep a change is required) enterprise that is the very opposite of conservatism."
"From the Eye of the Storm" (Zeena's column as Hemet-Neter Tepi Seth for the SLM), Volume I - Summer Solstice issue (2003): "Building a Sethian Left-Hand Path Tradition in the West. ~ Zeena Schreck

Did you realize that much of the original Bible included chapters of Gnostic wisdom?" Ambrose said. "They were purged from the King James Version, many of them lost and destroyed. Lost wisdom destroyed out of fear and narrow-mindedness. They were misunderstood, reviled, much like your own Mormon texts, as not fitting with the clockwork view of the universe as presented by the lying god's groveling servants. ~ R.S. Belcher

I have ... had a disturbing dream in which I break through a cave wall near Nag Hammadi and discover urns full of ancient Coptic scrolls. As I unfurl the first scroll, a subscription card to some Gnostic exercise magazine flutters out. ~ Colin McEnroe

Esoteric tradition teaches us that until we find the Grail, and it should be clearly understood that it is not a physical object in this time-space continuum, Lucifer must play out his role as the sacrificial king. He is doomed to incarnate in a 'cloak of flesh' as an avatar for the human race and pay the ultimate price as a scapegoat on their behalf. This is the ultimate sacrifice for being the light-bearer who brought down from Heaven the illumination of Gnostic wisdom and the primal fire of creativity. Lucifer eternally dies and is reborn to save humanity of itself. As the human race progresses spiritually so he can slowly ascend the Ladder of Lights back to the realm of the Gods beyond the Pole Star. He is the Lord of the Morning Star and the Lux Mundi (Light of the World) whose rebirth from darkness we celebrate every year at the winter solstice. ~ Nigel Jackson

Philosophical studies are beset by one peril, a person easily brings himself to think that he thinks; and a smattering of science encourages conceit. He is above his companions. A hieroglyphic is a spell. The gnostic dogma is cuneiform writing to the million. Moreover, the vain man is generally a doubter. It is Newton who sees himself in a child on the sea shore, and his discoveries in the colored shells. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

I stepped through the doors of the SA Café with a borrowed copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot in my hand, expecting to find more of the same, only to find Philip K. Dick sitting at a table, obsessing over Gnostic demiurges and ersatz realities, Robert A. Heinlein across from him, spouting libertarian aphorisms but paying for Dick's coffee. ~ Hal Duncan

The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific community. Liberal Christianity fostered ahistoricism by reducing Christianity to a universal, rational kernel of moral teaching. Along a more conservative, evangelical trajectory (and the Reformation is not wholly innocent here), it was recognized that Christians could not simply jettison the historical particularities of the Christian event: the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. However, there was still a quasi-Platonic, quasi-gnostic rejection of material history such that evangelicalism, while not devolving to a pure ahistoricism, become dominated by a modified ahistoricism we can call primitivism. Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God's action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity) and seeks to make only this first-century 'New Testament church' normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulated by a rigid distinction between Scripture and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as 'the traditions of men' as opposed to the 'God-give' r ~ James K.A. Smith

The 'medium' is unaware of its attractiveness, that's all. Everyone loves comics. I've proven this to my own satisfaction by handing them out to acountants, insurance brokers, hairdressers, mothers of children, black belts, pop stars, taxi drivers, painters, lesbians, doctors etc. etc. The X-Files, Buffy, the Matrix, X-Men - mainstream culture is not what it once was when science fiction and comics fans huddled in cellars like Gnostic Christians dodging the Romans. We should come up into the light soon before we suffocate. ~ Grant Morrison

Defeatist thoughts handicap persons from elevating their mechanistic life to superior states. The majority of persons consider themselves defeated even before beginning the struggle or the Gnostic esoteric work. ~ Samael Aun Weor

Gnostic teachings speak of the reality and power of evil and its fundamental presence throughout manifest existence. They declare that while we may not be able to rid the world or ourselves of evil, we may, and indeed will, rise above it through gnosis. ~ Stephan A. Hoeller

If we fail to understand the biblical story of Jesus, we will compromise our prophetic interpretations of the end-times. And that's exactly what we've done. ~ Eli Of Kittim

Where Voegelin seeks to show the Gnostic nature of modernity, Jonas seeks to show the modern nature of Gnosticism. Jonas draws parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern, secular existentialism to prove that Gnosticism is existentialist, not that existentialism is Gnostic. For Jonas, both philosophies stress above all the radical alienation of human beings from the world. ~ C. G. Jung

The Bible never mentions Christianity. It does not preach Christianity, nor does it encourage us to preach Christianity. Paul did not preach Christianity, nor did any of the other apostles. During centuries when the Church was strong and vibrant, she did not preach Christianity either. Christianity, like Judaism and "Yahwism", is an invention of biblical scholars, theologians, and politicians, and one of its chief effects is to keep Christians and the Church in their proper marginal place. The Bible speaks of Christians and of the Church, but Christianity is gnostic, and the Church firmly rejected gnosticism from her earliest days. ~ Peter J. Leithart

John Michell's The Dimensions of Paradise is inarguably among the most important Gnostic transmissions of recent generations. With his candid, uncomplicated style, John has made widely available the visions, the laws, and the numbers held within pure geometry and which integrate earth and sky, movement and form, cosmos and mankind. ~ Robert Lawlor

64. I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky. ~ Aleister Crowley

As Jung says more clearly of Christ: This Gnostic Christ ... symbolizes man's original unity and exalts it as the saving goal of his development. By composing ~ C. G. Jung

The Gnostic's passionate adoration of Sophia was known as philosophia – the love of Sophia – a mystical communication with divine feminine wisdom, having little to do with the strictly intellectual, most often masculine, pursuit currently labeled "philosophy. ~ Zeena Schreck

Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected. ~ Terence McKenna

If ignorance alone, according to Gnostic orthodoxy, keeps humans tied to the material world, knowledge frees them from it. Because humans are ignorant, that knowledge must come from outside them. Because the powers of the material world are ignorant, too, that knowledge must come from beyond them as well: it can come only from the godhead. The dependence of humanity on the godhead matches the dependence of the ego on the unconscious to reveal itself. ~ C. G. Jung

I guess, in a very real sense, I'm a Gnostic. I had been looking all my life for some great mystery ... I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved. ~ Whitfield Diffie

Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures - one human, the other divine - while Gnostic Christians, especially those called Docetists, claimed that Jesus only appeared to be human but was in fact fully God. ~ Reza Aslan

We drank the blood of our enemies. That's why you see Gnostics so hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire, stone night and winter day, if it's only for the touch of sweet lips on a humble bowl? No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be taken in by all the cells. Your officially defined 'mortal sin,' that is. A sin against you. A section of your penal code, that's all. ~ Thomas Pynchon

About the gnostic writers themselves and the setting in which they lived we know little, although gnostic Christians were influential enough to be denounced at length. ~ Elaine Pagels

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master. ~ Tim Kreider

Suggested that Gnosticism expressed a specific religious experience, which was frequently turned into a myth ... It seems clear that at least some of the major Gnostic systems were inspired by vivid emotions and personal experience. And it is now generally accepted that Gnosticism was not a philosophy, or even a Christian heresy, but a religion with its own specific views about God, the world, and man. ("Gnosticism," in Cavendish, Man, Myth, and Magic 1115) And, we might add, Gnosticism is a religion replete with sacraments that liberate the soul. ~ Stephan A. Hoeller

Dearest friend, do you not see All that we perceive Only reflects and shadows forth What our eyes cannot see. Dearest friend, do you not hear In the clamor of everyday life Only the unstrung echoing fall of Jubilant harmonies. Vladimir Soloviev, Russian Gnostic and philosopher, 1892 ~ J. Lincoln Fenn

If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away - for that's your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good thorough-going African insect. ~ Mary Kingsley

That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it, - 'These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:' we, on the contrary, prefer to say, 'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.' That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. Wha ~ John Henry Newman

A government has the duty to preserve the order as well as the truth which it represents; when a Gnostic leader appears and proclaims that God or progress, race or dialectic, has ordained him to become the existential ruler, a government is not supposed to betray its trust and to abdicate. And this rule suffers no exception for governments which operate under a democratic constitution and a bill of rights. Justice Jackson in his dissent in the Terminiello case formulated the point: the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact. A democratic government is not supposed to become an accomplice in its own overthrow by letting Gnostic movements grow prodigiously in the shelter of a muddy interpretation of civil rights; and if through inadvertence such a movement has grown to the danger point of capturing existential representation by the famous "legality" of popular elections, a democratic government is not supposed to bow to the "will of the people" but to put down the danger by force and, if necessary, to break the letter of the constitution in order to save its spirit. ~ Eric Voegelin

This system of chain wars can end only in two ways: either it will result in horrible physical destructions and concomitant revolutionary changes of social order beyond reasonable guesses; or, with the natural change of generations, it will lead to the abandoning of Gnostic dreaming before the worst has happened. ~ Eric Voegelin

I do not know any moral to be deduced from this view of the subject [of personal character], but one, namely, that we should mind our own business, cultivate our good qualities, if we have any, and irritate ourselves less about the absurdities of other people, which neither we nor they can help. I grant there is something in which I have said which I might be made to glance towards the doctrine of original sin, grace, election, reprobation, or the Gnostic Principle that acts did not determine the virtue or vice of the character; and in those doctrines, so far as they are deducible from what I have said, I agree
but always with a salvo. ~ William Hazlitt

The Gnostic Anthropology addresses the magnificence of the Being, your inner being. ~ Samael Aun Weor

Perhaps because alchemy combines the ancient, Gnostic focus on the immaterial and transcendent soul, or spark, with the modern, scientific-like focus on the transformation of worldly matter, it serves to connect the two. Despite his professed closer kinship to alchemy, ~ C. G. Jung

It is a surprise to me to like myself; among all the elaborate possibilities I contemplated for my future, that never figured. My hard-won contentment reflects the simple truth that inner peace often hinges on outer peace. In the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas, Jesus says, If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. ~ Andrew Solomon

The gnostic is Muslim in that his whole being is surrendered to God; he has no separate individual existence of his own. He is like the birds and the flowers in his yielding to the Creator; like them, like all the elements of the cosmos, he reflects the Divine to his own degree. He reflects it actively, however, they passively; his participation is a conscious one. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The prophetic mission created a scientific-gnostic change in the world that converted the insipid Greek philosophies, which were formulated with all their past and present worth by the Greeks themselves into an objective mysticism and a veritable intuitive perception for masters of divine insight. ~ Ruhollah Khomeini

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain 'gnosis'--had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion ...

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'. It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the 'gnostic' of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

If the Gospel of Judas found in Codex Tchacos can be convincingly identified as being a Coptic translation of the original Greek Gospel of Judas that Bishop Ireneaus mentioned around A.D. 180 in his book, "Against Heresies," it will be an important step in the study of ancient gnosticism. We would have for the first time the chance to trace back the history of Sethian gnosticism to before the time of Irenaeus. This would be a significant gain in our knowledge of early Christianity. ~ Gregor Wurst

It was as if the entire day, the entire vacation even, were leading up to a single moment. he felt certain then that stan lee was in some direct communication with the universe - in a way, say, that the watcher, the most mysterious marvel character, was content like some gnostic entity merely to know of machinations of creation - and that through lee's spiritually advanced vision, paul's own destiny was entrapped in the monthly serializations of these kitschy superheroes. he seemed both influenced and influencer in the world of marvel. ~ Rick Moody

I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA . ~ Aleister Crowley

Those with a low view of the Bible should not attempt listening prayer, for it can lead into dangerous gnostic listening. ~ Leanne Payne

Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare. ~ Eric Voegelin

The Gnostic needs a lot of patience because any act of impatience leads him to failure. ~ Samael Aun Weor

The question concerning Jesus: do you want to know the real story, or just the allegory? ~ Eli Of Kittim

Love is an involuntary gift that manifests unplanned. ~ Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place. ~ N. T. Wright

I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality. ~ Robert Crumb

If we can believe in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, old Uncle Jesus said, If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you. ~ Anne Lamott

12. Historians today rely on classics like Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Caesar's Gallic War, and Tacitus's Histories. The earliest copies we have for these date from 1,300, 900, and 700 years after the original writing, respectively, and there are eight extant copies of the first, ten of the second, and two of the third. In contrast, the earliest copy of Mark's gospel is dated at AD 130 (a century after the original writing), and there are 5,000 ancient Greek copies, along with nearly 20,000 Latin and other ancient manuscripts. The sheer volume of ancient manuscripts provides sufficient comparison between copies to provide an accurate reproduction of the original text. Ironically, a number of fashionable scholars attracted to the so-called gnostic gospels as an "alternative Christianity" have far fewer manuscripts, and the original writings cannot be dated any earlier than a century after the canonical Gospels. ~ Michael S. Horton

One of the towering figures of the age of Enlightenment was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to this day in German-speaking lands as the poet of princes and prince of poets. Unlike Voltaire, he openly practiced esoteric disciplines, particularly alchemy. He wrote a famous verse about the Cathars, which translated says: "There were those who knew the Father. What became of them? Oh, they took them and burned them!" Goethe's chief work, of course, is his Faust. As noted in chapter 8, the figure of Faust was inspired by the image of the early Gnostic teacher Simon Magus, one of whose honorific names was Faustus. While in Christopher Marlowe's sixteenth-century play, ~ Stephan A. Hoeller

The real gnostic does not attribute any "state" to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather
through an "instinct for holding back"
to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of "cosmic play" (lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, "horizontal" beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, "humanists" that they are, below the vocation of man ~ Frithjof Schuon

One of these was Harry Hay, a young actor and communist who had been performing in Clifford Odets' play on unionization, Waiting for Lefty, at the Hollywood Guild Theatre. Hay would later become father of the gay rights movement in America, but he was hired to play the organ for the OTO's Gnostic Mass, having been drawn to the temple through his friendship with Regina Kahl. ~ George Pendle