25 Quotes by Hermes Trismegistus

My discourse leads to the truth; the mind is great and guided by this teaching is able to arrive at some understanding. When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.

The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is an image of heaven or, to be more precise, that everything governed and moved in heaven came down to Egypt and was transferred there? If truth were told, our land is the temple of the whole world.

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.