Gnostic Quotes
What’s the meaning of life? Aphorisms, maxims and quotations expressing the paradoxical essence of gnosticism.
Baboons
"Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful." - Aldous Huxley
"What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of [...]
Bad Dreams
"Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams." - Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence
"The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up." [...]
Becoming God
"Fundamentalists believe Jesus was God becoming man. I believe that Jesus was man becoming God." - Eric Butterworth
"To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence [...]
Beginning
"In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea." - Douglas Adams
"In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too Human, pub. 1878
"In [...]
Belief
"Man is what he believes." - Anton Chekhov
"Whatever one believes to be true either is true or becomes true in one's mind." - John C. Lilly
"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired." - Nikos Kazantzakis [...]
Better
"It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it." - Joseph Joubert
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." - Herman Melville
Between
"That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art." - John A. Locke
"Between the wish and the thing, life lies waiting." - Unknown
Bible
"…the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which part to believe or whether any…" - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
"The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it." - Robert Heinlein, The Number of the Beast [...]
Bibles
"There have been many alleged revelations of God. There have, indeed, been many Gods as there have been many Bibles." - E. Haldeman-Julius, The Meaning Of Atheism
"All Bibles are man-made." - Thomas Edison
Birth
"The intellect of most men is barren. They neither fertilize nor are fertilized. It is the marraige of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination." - Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 20, 1851
"Thoughts give birth to a creative force that is neither elemental nor sidereal. [...]
Birth & Death
"Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, one living the others death and dying the others life." - Heraclitus
"Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible." - Samuel Butler, 1612-1680
Bisexuality
"Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual." - Rita Mae Brown
"A lot of my peer group think I'm an eccentric bisexual, like I may even have an ammonia-filled tentacle somewhere on my body. That's okay." - Robert Downey Jr.
"Bisexuality immediately [...]
Black & White
"How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps [...]
Body
"Man is a mind betrayed, not served, by his organs." - Edmond and Jules De Goncourt, 1822-1896
"Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours [...]
Books
"The books which help you most are those which make you think the most." - Theodore Parker
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame." - Oscar Wilde
"Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by [...]
Boredom
"The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel [...]
Born
"To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one." - Jack Kornfield
"A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake." - George Gurdjieff
"It [...]
Born-again Christians
If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being." - Jerry Falwell
"Born again?! No, I'm not. Excuse me for getting it right the first time." - Dennis Miller
"Why do born-again people so often make you wish they'd never been born the first time?" - Katherine Whitehorn
"The [...]
Brain
"Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage." - W.S. Burroughs
"The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism." - Arthur Schopenhauer
"The brain is an extraterrestrial organ. The brain is an alien intelligence." - Timothy Leary
[...]
Breeds
"The sleep of reason breeds monsters" - Goya
"The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the mind." - William Blake
Burroughs, William S.
"There is no line between the ‘real world’ and ‘world of myth and symbol.’ Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination." - William S. Burroughs
"…trip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass." - William S. Burroughs [...]
Butterfly
"Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly." - Andre Gide
"I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a [...]
