Gnostic Quotes
What’s the meaning of life? Aphorisms, maxims and quotations expressing the paradoxical essence of gnosticism.
Cannibals
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 3, pub. 1851
"What characterizes the Cannibals is that most of them are born Christians, think of Jesus as Love, and get an erection from the thought of whippings, blood, burning crosses, burning bodies, and screams in [...]
Catholic Sex
"God created sex. Priests created marriage." - Voltaire
"Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance." - Thomas Paine, Theological Works of Thomas Paine, p.207
"I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be [...]
Cells
"Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while." - Unknown
"Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On that score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state - that's the unconscionable torture - [...]
Center
"Truth lies within ourselves: it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to Know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape than in effecting entry for light supposed to be without." [...]
Chance
"There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny." - Schiller, 1759-1805
"There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Illusions, pub. [...]
Change
"If you never change your mind, why have one?" - Edward De Bono
"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." - Aldous Huxley
"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And [...]
Chaos
"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds." - George Santayana
"For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened of finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over [...]
Chaos II
"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"[Artists] love to immerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, [...]
Christian Heaven
"As for the Christian theology, can you imagine anything more appallingly idiotic than the Christian idea of heaven? What kind of deity is it that would be capable of creating angels and men to sing his praises day and night to all eternity? It is, of course - the figure of an Oriental despot, with [...]
Christians
"If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian." - Mark Twain, Notebook
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Mahatma Gandhi
Church
"My true church is a whorehouse - the only one that gives me true satisfaction." - Georges Bataille
"Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced." - Marquis De Sade, 1740-1814
"The Church has had its fangs on our crotch for a long time." - Larry Flynt
Circle
"The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere." - Empedocles
"Every man is the center of a circle, whose fatal circumference he can not pass." - John James Ingalls
"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary [...]
Cocoon
"The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere." - James Russell Lowell, 1819-1891
"So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every [...]
Comedy & Tragedy
"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." - Charlie Chaplin
"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think." - Horace Walpole
"Comedy is tragedy plus time." - Carol Burnett
Complaint Desk
"After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager.'" - William S. Burroughs
"God's final message to his Creation: We Apologise For The Inconvenience" - Douglas Adams
Conformity
"The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity." - Carl Van Doren, 1885-1950
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Every society honors its live conformists and [...]
Consciousness
"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness." - Max Eastman
"…Lucifer the bringer of light in the shape of the serpent of paradise, and Adam, the symbolic first man, [both] suffer for the sake of consciousness." - Edward Whitmont, The Alchemy of Healing, quoted by Larry Dossey M.D. in Be [...]
Consistency
"People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent.'" - Oliver Wendell Holmes
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." - R.W. Emerson
Contradict
"The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves." - Oscar Wilde
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman
Contradictions
"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions." - Andre Breton, 1889-1966
"A successful work of art is not [...]
Creation & Destruction
"The true value of a human being can be found in degrees to which he has attained liberation from the self." - Albert Einstein
"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates." - Thomas Szasz, [...]
Creation of Man
"I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability." - Oscar Wilde
"God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days." - Christopher Morley
Creativity
"Creation is a drug I can't do without." - Cecil B. De Mille
"The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate." - Agnes De Mille
"Tennessee Williams said if he got rid of his demons, he would lose his angels." - Dakin Williams
"An artist is [...]
Critics
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan
Cross
"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little Electric Chairs around their necks instead of crosses." - Lenny Bruce
"I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood." - George Carlin
"The [...]
Curiousity
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." - Ellen Parr
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if [...]
