Éliphas Lévi > Quotes

“Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“In olden times gold was manufactured by science; nowadays science must be renewed by gold. We have fixed the volatile and we must now volatilize the fixed—in other words, we have materialized spirit, and we must now spiritualize matter.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the remains and evidences of its previous life. So also Moses saw to it that all those who had known Egypt and her mysteries should end their life in the desert; at Ephesus St Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“It must be pleasant to be occasionally guilty of a small abomination.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth; in visible nature, it is the sun: in the subterranean and mineral world, it is the purest and most perfect gold. Hence the search after the Great Work is called the Search for the Absolute, and this work itself is termed the operation of the sun.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Everything lives by movement, everything is maintained by equilibrium, and harmony results from the analogy of contraries; this law is the form of forms.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Man's greatest wisdom is to choose his obsession well.”
― Éliphas Lévi, El libro de los sabios: Obra postuma

“When Christianity proscribed the public exercise of the ancient worships, the partisans of the latter were compelled to meet in secret for the celebration of their mysteries. Initiates presided over these assemblies and soon established a kind of orthodoxy among the varieties of persecuted worships, this being facilitated by the aid of magical truth and by the fact that proscription unites wills and forges bonds of brotherhood between men.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Those who abdicate the empire of reason and permit their wills to wander in pursuit of reflections in the Astral Light, are subject to alternations of mania and melancholy which have originated all the marvels of demoniacal possession, though it is true, at the same time, that by means of these reflections impure spirits can act upon such souls, make use of them as docile instruments and even habitually torment their organism, wherein they enter and reside by obsession, or embryonically. These kabalistic terms are explained in the Hebrew book of the Revolution of Souls, of which our thirteenth chapter will contain a succinct analysis. It is therefore extremely dangerous to make sport of the Mysteries of Magic; it is above all excessively rash to practice its rites from curiosity, by way of experiment and as if to exploit higher forces. The inquisitive who, without being adepts, busy themselves with evocations or occult magnetism, are like children playing with fire in the neighborhood of a cask of gunpowder; sooner or later they will fall victims to some terrible explosion.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Cuando se ama no se razona. Cuando se razona parece que no se ama. Cuando se razona después de haber amado, se comprende por qué se amaba. Cuando se ama después de haber razonado, se ama mejor.
He aquí el sendero del progreso de las almas”
― Éliphas Lévi, El Mago: El Libro de los Esplendores/El Libro de los Sabios (Arbol Sagrado)

“You, therefore, who are undertaking the study of this book, if you persevere to the end and understand it, you will be either a monarch or a madman. Do what you will with this volume, you will be unable to despise or to forget it.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine And Ritual

“love is nothing but a desire and an enjoyment,it is mortal.”
― Éliphas Lévi

“To be able to do and to abstain from doing, is to be twice able.”
― Éliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation

“The triad, being the fundamental principle of the whole Kabalah, or Sacred Tradition of our fathers, was necessarily the fundamental dogma of Christianity, the apparent dualism of which it explains by the intervention of a harmonious and all-powerful unity. Christ did not put His teaching into writing, and only revealed it in secret to His favored disciple, the one Kabalist, and he a great Kabalist, among the apostles. So is the Apocalypse the book of the Gnosis or Secret Doctrine of the first Christians, and the key of this doctrine is indicated by an occult versicle of the Lord's Prayer, which the Vulgate leaves untranslated, while in the Greek Rite, the priests only are permitted to pronounce it. This versicle, completely kabalistic, is found in the Greek text of the Gospel according to St Matthew, and in several Hebrew copies, as follows:

Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εις τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήν.

The sacred word MALKUTH substituted for KETHER, which is its kabalistic correspondent, and the equipoise of GEBURAH and CHESED, repeating itself in the circles of heavens called eons by the Gnostics, provided the keystone of the whole Christian Temple in the occult versicle. It has been retained by Protestants in their New Testament, but they have failed to discern its lofty and wonderful meaning, which would have unveiled to them all the Mysteries of the Apocalypse. There is, however, a tradition in the Church that the manifestation of this mysteries is reserved till the last times.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Todos los males del alma humana provienen del temor y del deseo. Las amenazas y las promesas son los grandes medios de corromper y embrutecer a los hombres. El dogma que anuncia el privilegio y que amenaza con un castigo exorbitante, monstruoso y sin fin a las multitudes ignorantes no es ni divino, ni humano, ni razonable, ni civilizador”
― Éliphas Lévi, El Mago: El Libro de los Esplendores/El Libro de los Sabios (Arbol Sagrado)

“Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical
allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.”
― Eliphas Lévi

“It is undoubtedly contagious to breathe the same air as diseased persons, and to be within the circle of attraction and expansion which surrounds the wicked.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Dogme Et Rituel De La Haute Magie Part I

“Occult Medicine is essentially sympathetic. Reciprocal affection, or at least real goodwill, must exist between doctor and patient. Syrups and juleps have very little inherent virtue; they are what they become through the mutual opinion of operator and subject; hence homoeopathic medicine dispenses with them and no serious inconvenience follows.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“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?”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“Religion realizes philosophy by adapting it to the weaknesses of the vulgar....”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

“La vie nous habitue à la mort par le sommeil. La vie nous avertit qu'il existe une autre vie par le rêve.”
― Éliphas Lévi

“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.”
― Éliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation

“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! The”
― Éliphas Lévi, Dogme Et Rituel De La Haute Magie Part I

“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.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Dogme Et Rituel De La Haute Magie Part I

“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? It”
― Éliphas Lévi, Dogme Et Rituel De La Haute Magie Part I

“Weak people talk and do not act, strong people act and keep silent.”
― Éliphas Lévi, El libro de los sabios: Obra postuma

“To know all is an impossible dream; but woe unto him who dares not to learn all, and who does not know that, in order to know anything, one must learn eternally!”
― Éliphas Lévi, The Key Of The Mysteries

“Men, tired of the light, take refuge in the shadow of corporeal substance: the dream of the void which God fills soon seems to them greater than God himself, and hell is created.”
― Éliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation

“Let parents be ever on their guard, for no one can kindle hell in his own blood, and devote his own issue to misfortune, without being himself burnt and made wretched.”
― Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual