Hermeticism Quotes

“Nothing stands still - everything is being born, growing, dying - the very instant a thing reaches its height, it begins to decline - the law of rhythm is in constant operations....”
― Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece

“Birth is not the beginning of life - only of an individual awareness. Change into another state is not death - only the ending of this awareness.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“No eyes will raise to heaven. The pure will be thought insane and the impure will be honoured as wise. The madman will be believed brave, and the wicked esteemed as good.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“Do not make the mistake of supposing that the little world you see around you - the Earth, which is a mere grain of dust in the Universe - is the Universe itself. There are millions upon millions of such worlds, and greater. And there are millions of millions of such Universes in existence within the Infinite Mind of THE ALL”
― Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece

“Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad.”
― Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled

“The present issues from the past, and the future from the present. Everything is made one by this continuity. Time is like a circle, where all the points are so linked that one cannot say where it begins or ends, for all points precede and follow one another for ever.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“The lips of Wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding.”
― Three Initiates, Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece

“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, Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth

“Humanity looked in awe upon the beauty and the everlasting duration of creation. The exquisite sky flooded with sunlight. The majesty of the dark night lit by celestial torches as the holy planetary powers trace their paths in the heavens in fixed and steady metre - ordering the growth of things with their secret infusions.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“Whenever we talk about darkness and light, the terms seem so abstract that many consider the answers to be found in meditation and yoga, but I’m here to tell you that the answers are in the books you will never read, waiting all your life in the libraries you ignored and the bookstores you didn’t visit. I’m here to tell you as well that you are your own Satan and evil can’t possibly interfere more in your life than what you’re already doing to yourself by remaining ignorant. Until you choose the light, darkness is your personal choice, and there’s no reason to feel any empathy for you.”
― Robin Sacredfire

“Begin then, my son Tat, with a prayer to the Lord and Father, who alone is good; pray that you may find favour with him, and that one ray of him, if only one, may flash into your mind, that so you may have power to grasp in thought that mighty Being. For thought alone can see that which is hidden, inasmuch as thought itself is hidden from sight; and if even the thought which is within you is hidden from your sight, how can He, being in himself, be manifested to you through your bodily eyes? But if you have power to see with the eyes of the mind, then, my son, He will manifest himself to you. For the Lord manifests himself ungrudgingly through all the universe; and you can behold God's image with your eyes, and lay hold on it with your hands.”
― Walter Scott, Hermetica: Volume 1 of 4

“Man is the most divine of all the beings, for amongst all living things, Atum associates with him only - speaking to him in dreams at night, foretelling the future for him in the flight of birds, the bowels of beasts, and the whispering oak.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum

“The truth is more complex than it seems and a good heart has more impact than anyone with a thousand words or actions.”
― Robin Sacredfire

“But in this life we are still too weak to see that sight; we have not strength to open our mental eyes, and to behold the beauty of the Good, that incorruptible beauty which no tongue can tell. Then only will you see it, when you cannot speak of it; for the knowledge of it is deep silence, and supression of all the senses. He who has apprehended beauty of the Good can apprehend nothing else; he who has seen it can see nothing else; he cannot hear speech about aught else; he cannot move his body at all; he forgets bodily sensations and all bodily movements, and is still. But the beauty of the Good bathes his mind in light, and takes all his soul up to itself, and draws it forth from the body, and changes the whole man into eternal substance. For it cannot be, my son, that a soul should become a god while it abides in a human body; it must be changed, and then behold the beauty of the Good, and therewith become a god.”
― Walter Scott, Hermetica: Volume 1 of 4

“You are the mathematical and geometrical centre of all the universe, where the centre is you, and radius goes into the infinity.”
― Count Stefan Colonna Walewski, A System of Caucasian Yoga

“Many philosophers and theologians have grappled with the question of whether reality is a dream, or whether we are the dreamer or the dreamed. In Hermetic philosophy, the answer is both. We are but the dreams and thoughts of the Infinite Mind, but as microcosms of the Infinite Mind, we are also the dreamers.”
― Mat Auryn, Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation

“Nothing can create more dramatic changes than simple and pure love and compassion. When people pray, their prayers are listened, but the answers manifest in forms that their selfishness blinds them to see.”
― Robin Sacredfire

“Would that it were possible for you to grow wings, and soar into the air! Poised between earth and heaven, you might see the solid earth, the fluid sea and the streaming rivers, the wandering air, the penetrating fire, the courses of the stars, and the swiftness of the movement with which heaven encompasses all. What happiness were that, my son, to see all these borne along with one impulse, and to behold Him who is unmoved moving in all that moves, and Him who is hidden made manifest through his works!”
― Walter Scott, Hermetica: Volume 1 of 4

“Кад се предмету каже име, уништава се три четвртине онога уживања у песми које се састоји у постепеном погађању: наговестити и евоцирати – то је оно што машту усхићује.

To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem which is made up of gradual discovery: to suggest it, that is the dream.”
― Stéphane Mallarmé

“The purpose of our life is twofold: to abide by the laws of the Universe, and to awaken spiritually.”
― Jack Freestone

“Such a person does not cease longing after insatiable appetites, struggling in the darkness without satisfaction. This tortures him and makes the fire grow upon him all the more.”
― Hermes Trismegistus, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius

“I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you’d be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Magic is knowledge suitable for a craft-guild, the expectation of the malignant or benign through the name of God, both through the names themselves and certainly through the names of things. Whence it follows that magic is knowledge about to be interpreted, because all a name is to be when a word should be a word, through each thing which a language is transmitted, if the magician might be able to write the letters down. Much is said, the knowledge is of words,... "

'Height of Sacred Magic', Berengario Ganell, 1346'.”
― Maxwell Lewis Latham

“The first human used two principles, the simplest possible system, because abstract thinking did not belong to his strengths. We could even say that they did not need it. Their spirit lived in the spiritual world, while their body was doing whatever they wanted, or whatever they had been forced to do when cold and hungry… He was allowed to be doing the things that he wanted, for his will was the Great Will, the Will of God. Although, like the others, I am not allowed to lift the pall that covers the Tradition of the First, we can be sure that it contains the basic rules of sexual life which, from the perspective of our comfortable workrooms, appears to be the basic laws of sexual magic. And this magic that is infinitely simple and infinitely powerful, produced an immense miracle—that we’re here.”
― Lukáš Loužecký, Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic

“Today’s man is absorbed in abstraction, and lives in his virtual world, far from the goals of hermeticism, and equally distant from the spirit and from nature. Liquid crystals, in the abstract sense, caused the same thing to occur, like in Egyptian antiquity, with the long copper hook of the embalmer… 'Our man' would like to see all of the mysteries of antiquity immediately and fully because his own era is not enough!

This departure of the brain from the skull (or to use abstract terms: the atrophy of the intellect), can explain the behavior of our contemporaries: drug experiments led by materialistic logic, various forms of folk magic (a false part of Neo-paganism, healing with cracked crystals, calling angels in groups of absolutely undisciplined participants) and a large increase of interest in 'the mysteries of sex'.”
― Lukáš Loužecký, Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic

“It was the remembrance of this scientific and religious Absolute, of this doctrine that is summed up in a word, of this Word, in fine, alternately lost and found again, that was transmitted to the Elect of all the Ancient Initiations: it was this same remembrance, preserved, or perhaps profaned in the celebrated Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and, above all, of their mutual devotedness and of their power.”
― Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

“And, thus, think from thyself, and bid thy soul go unto any land; and there more quickly than thy bidding will it be. And bid it journey oceanwards; and there, again, immediately ’twill be, not as if passing on from place to place, but as if being there.

And bid it also mount to heaven; and it will need no wings, nor will aught hinder it, nor fire of sun, nor æther, nor vortex-swirl, nor bodies of the other stars; but, cutting through them all, it will soar up to the last Body. And shouldst thou will to break through this as well, and contemplate what is beyond—if there be aught beyond the Cosmos, it is permitted thee.”
― G.R.S. Mead, Thrice Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis

“(...) A dita transformação conseguir-se-ia por meio da iniciação, no sentido mais restrito do termo. Mediante a iniciação, alguns homens escapavam duma natureza e alcançavam a outra, deixando assim de ser homens. A sua aparição noutra forma de existência constituía, no plano desta última, um acontecimento rigorosamente equivalente ao da geração e do nascimento físico. Assim, pois, aqueles homens re-nasciam, eram re-gerados (ou re-«generados»). Tal como o nascimento físico implica a perda da consciência do estado superior, também a morte significa a perda da consciência do estado inferior. Daí que, na medida em que se perde toda a consciência do estado superior — quer dizer, segundo os termos que já conhecemos, na medida em que sobrevêm a «identificação» [a «ensimesmação»] —, nessa mesma medida a perda de consciência do estado inferior (a humana), provocada pela morte e pela desintegração do sustentáculo de tal consciência (o corpo), equivale à perda de toda a consciência no sentido pessoal. Ao sono eterno, à existência larvar no Hades, à dissolução pensada como destino de todos aqueles para quem as formas desta vida humana constituem o princípio e o fim, a tudo isso só escaparão aqueles que ainda em vida souberam orientar a sua consciência para o mundo superior. Os Iniciados, os Adeptos, encontram-se no extremo desse caminho. Conseguida a «recordação», a Άνάμνεσις, segundo a expressão de Plutarco, fazem-se livres, desligam-se dos liames e, coroados, celebram os «mistérios» e veem sobre a terra a massa dos que não são iniciados nem são «puros» a afundarem-se e a perecerem no lodo e nas trevas.”
― Julius Evola, A Tradição Hermética

“The true meaning of life is not known to men on this plane, but the highest authorities, and our own intuitions, teach us that we will make no mistake in living up to the best that is in us...”
― The Three Initiates, Kybalion a Study of the Hermetic Philosophy

“The true meaning of life is not known to men on this plane, but the highest authorities, and our own intuitions, teach us that we will make no mistake in living up to the best that is in us...”
― Three Initiates, Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece