55 Quotes by Éliphas Lévi

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.

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.

It must be pleasant to be occasionally guilty of a small abomination.

Man's greatest wisdom is to choose his obsession well.

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.

Si Edipo en lugar de hacer morir a la esfinge la hubiera domado y enganchado a su carro para entrar a Tebas, hubiera sido rey sin incesto, sin calamidades y sin exilio.

El cristianismo no debía odiar a la magia; pero la ignorancia humana siempre tiene miedo de lo desconocido.

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.

Religion realizes philosophy by adapting it to the weaknesses of the vulgar....