Opus Diaboli Quotes

Know this: I, Mercurius, have here set down a full, true and infallible account of the Great Work. But I give you fair warning that unless you seek the true philosophical gold and not the gold of the vulgar, unless you heart is fixed with unbending intent on the true Stone of the Philosophers, unless you are steadfast in your quest, abiding by God's laws in all faith and humility and eschewing all vanity, conceit, falsehood, intemperance, pride, lust and faint-heartedness, read no farther lest I prove fatal to you. For I am the watery venomous serpent who lies buried at the earth's centre; I am the fiery dragon who flies through the air. I am the one thing necessary for the whole Opus. I am the spirit of metals, the fire which does not burn, the water which does not wet the hands. If you find the way to slay me you will find the philosophical mercury of the wise, even the White Stone beloved of the Philosophers. If you find the way to raise me up again, you will find the philosophical sulphur, that is, the Red Stone and Elixir of Life. Obey me and I will be your servant; free me and I will be your friend. Enslave me and I am a dangerous enemy; command me and I will make you mad; give me life and you will die. ~ Patrick Harpur

He considered for a moment, then started to play a piece that was very familiar to Ruth, although she had no idea what it was. It was lilting and wistful, and she could have sung the melody if she had wished.
"Alright?" He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
"Yes. Exactly."
It was effortless and perfect, and he played it through to the end, closing with the softest and most delicate chords, which hung and faded in the quiet hall like the grains of dust raining through the evening light. Ruth was touched. It was all she had wanted. He did not move until there was complete silence again, then he closed the lid without saying anything, and stood up, shoving back the chair. ... "What was that piece?"
"A Brahms waltz."
"Hasn't it got a name?" she wanted it to remember.
"Number fifteen. Opus thirty-nine."
It hadn't sounded like numbers to Ruth. ~ K.M. Peyton

Martin Buber as described for basic virtues cultivated by the Hasidim to overcome the separation of the sacred and secular. . . . St. Benedict spoke of them as truly seeking God, zeal for a humble way of life, zeal for obedience, and zeal for the opus of God. Buber catalogues them as kavana (single-mindedness), shiflut (humility), avada (service), and hitlahavut (fire of ecstasy). 129 ~ M. Basil Pennington

The world I live in is composing a magnum opus to the heart-stopping, outrageously unbelievable unconditional love and acceptance of God that crushes and demolishes the vestiges of self-righteous "us and them." It's ~ Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation. ~ James Boswell

I ignore Hallmark Holidays. And this comes from a guy who has sold a million Opus greeting cards. ~ Berkeley Breathed

I will torture you for a human eternity, during which time you will beg me for death by an Opus 24/24, or an ax, or a thousand snakebites. I can see the future, Daniel, and I am looking forward to it, every excruciating second of your murder and dismembedment. Isn't that a wonderful English word, dis-member-ment? ~ James Patterson

Remember that writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself. ~ E.B. White

For us the question is, has the marriage to do with well-being or with salvation? Is it a soteriological institution or a welfare institution?Is marriage, this opus contra natura a path to individuation or a way to well-being? ~ Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig

Cotton Mather's publications in his own lifetime amounted to more than 400 titles, and his magnum opus, on which he labored most of his life, remains unpublished: a commentary on every verse of every book of the Bible. Anyone who leaves that kind of record behind issues an irresistible invitation to historians. ~ Edmund Morgan

Magnum Opus : Without me, you all,
would not be Breathing, no more.
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
Religion of Blue Circle
October 17, 2016 ~ Petra Hermans

In every corpus, there is magnum opus. ~ Anyaele Sam Chiyson

Take more selfies. Not because you need validation or likes or comments. but because you are here on this earth. Alive and holy and true. And yes, your beauty deserves to be seen and known, most especially by you. You are worthy of being the subject of your own art. It is okay to capture the process of your own becoming. To be your own kind and gentle and fierce witness. To learn the truth of your eyes and your skin and your bones. To choose to show what wants to be shown, to name what wishes to be named, to claim ownership of the story that is told about you by being the one to tell it.

Dear girl. YOU are the greatest art you will ever create. The masterpiece. The magnum opus. You're it. However you want to be.

Look at yourself now, miracle that you are, look at yourself and soak in the wonder, until you no longer want to look away. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend 'the One, the All'. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites. ~ C.G. Jung

Opus Dei is an efficient machine run to achieve world power. ~ Penny Lernoux

Write the masterpiece that has not been written.
Sing the masterpiece that has not been sung.
Paint the masterpiece that has not been painted.
Create the masterpiece that has not been created. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood. ~ Herman Melville

What I wish is that people would look beyond the tribbles and see I've written some other books that I really would like people to notice. There's 'The Man Who Folded Himself,' there's 'The Martian Child,' which is about my son and the adoption. There's 'The War Against The Chtorr,' which is my magnum opus, my great epic story. ~ David Gerrold

I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.' ~ Harvey Pekar

At a tender age, I commandeered half a quire of foolscap from my father's desk and sat down to write a book ... I had observed onprinted fly leaves the words "By the author of, etc." ... So under the title of my prospective work I wrote: By the author of "Les Miserables," "The Woman in White," "Dombey and Son," "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Our Life in the Highlands," the last-named being an opus of good Queen Victoria. I had not read all these works but they existed on our bookshelves, and I hoped to produce something worthy of comparison. ~ Rheta Childe Dorr

Det ille veniam facile, cui venia est opus - the one who needs pardon should readily grant it ~ Seneca.

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I've heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures' myths, and maybe that was true. I don't know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others - even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight. ~ N.K. Jemisin

If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie. ~ Alan Bradley

Coldplay's ultimately show-stopping opus "Fix You" might never have seen the light of day had Chris given up and caved in when Guy politely asked of him one morning: "So, 'tears stream down your face, and AAAAH.' What's that all about, then? ~ Matt McGinn

I'm fascinated by power, especially veiled power. Shadow power. The National Security Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office. Opus Dei. The idea that everything happens for reasons we're not quite seeing. ~ Dan Brown

I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die. ~ Wes Bentley

It's amazing that schools still offer courses in musical composition. What a useless thing to spend money on -- to take a course in college to learn how to be a modern composer! No matter how good the course is, when you get out, what the fuck will you do for a living? (The easiest thing to do is become a composition teacher yourself, spreading 'the disease' to the next generation.)

One of the things that determines the curriculum in music schools is: which of the current fashions in modern music gets the most grant money from the mysterious benefactors in Foundation-Land. For a while there, unless you were doing serial music (in which the pitches have numbers, the dynamics have numbers, the vertical densities have numbers, etc) -- if it didn't have a pedigree like that, it wasn't a good piece of music. Critics and academicians stood by, waiting to tell you what a piece of shit your opus was if your numbers didn't add up. (Forget what it sounded like, or whether it moved anybody, or what it was about. The most important thing was the numbers. ~ Frank Zappa

Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In search of Magnum opus - perhaps you were divined to be mine. ~ Truth Devour

Don't judge without having heard both sides. Even persons who think themselves virtuous very easily forget this elementary rule of prudence. ~ Josemaria Escriva

I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom's conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, ~ Stanisław Lem

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus. ~ Stewart O'Nan

All our nourishment becomes ourselves; we eat ourselves into being ... For every bite we take contains in itself all our organs, all that is included in the whole man, all of which he is constituted ... We do not eat bone, blood vessels, ligaments, and seldom brain, heart, and entrails, nor fat, therefore bone does not make bone, nor brain make brain, but every bite contains all these. Bread is blood, but who sees it? It is fat, who sees it? ... for the master craftsman in the stomach is good. He can make iron out of brimstone: he is there daily and shapes the man according to his form. ~ Paracelsus

stationery of Magnum Opus, ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrae naturam": A wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The antagonists of finance's future, the diaboli ex machina, may have no face at all. ~ Usman W. Chohan

There is another apt Latin expression: Materiam superabat opus. (The workmanship is better than the material.) The material we've been given genetically, emotionally, financially, that's where we begin. We don't control that. We do control what we make of that material, and whether we squander it. ~ Ryan Holiday

Then Elizabeth came, bearing a tray of cakes and sweets, and finally Harriet, who carried with her a small sheaf of paper - her current opus, Henry VIII and the Unicorn of Doom .
"I'm not certain Frances is going to be appeased by an evil unicorn," Anne told her.
Harriet looked up with one arched brow. "She did not specify that it must be a good unicorn."
Anne grimaced. "You're going to have a battle on your hands, that's all I'm going to say on the matter."
Harriet shrugged, then said, "I'm going to begin in act two. Act one is a complete disaster. I've had to rip it completely apart."
"Because of the unicorn?"
"No," Harriet said with a grimace. "I got the order of the wives wrong. It's divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, widowed."
"How cheerful."
Harriet gave her a bit of a look, then said, "I switched one of the divorces with a beheading."
"May I give you a bit of advice?" Anne asked.
Harriet looked up.
"Don't ever let anyone hear you say that out of
context. ~ Julia Quinn