Gnostic Quotes
What’s the meaning of life? Aphorisms, maxims and quotations expressing the paradoxical essence of gnosticism.
Dance
"On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined." - Mark Twain
"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music." - Angela Monet
"Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed [...]
Darkness
"The wise learn many things from their enemies." - Aristophanes
"Man’s chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him." - Ernest Jones
"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." - Eric Hoffer
‘The dictate of the light says: "Know yourself and [...]
Daydream
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." - William Dement
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night." - Edgar Allan Poe
"I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same [...]
Death
"Without knowledge, life is not more than the shadow of death." - Moliere, 1622-1673
"Less base the fear of death than fear of life." - Edward Young
"Life is a great surprise. I don’t see why death should not be an even greater one." - Vladimir Nabokov
Dehumanization
"What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology." - Terry Eagleton
"Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons." - Aldous Huxley, Adonis and the Alphabet
Deification
"If cows and horses or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and make statues as men do, horses would draw likenesses of the gods similar to horses, cows to cows, and they would create statues in the same form as they themselves each had." - Xenophanes, Fragment 15, 580-470 B.C
"If triangles made [...]
Demiurge
"You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say [...]
Demonic Sex
"To hear many religious people talk, one would think God created the torso, head, legs and arms, but the devil slapped on the genitals." - Don Schrader
"Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness — pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from [...]
Demons
"Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon." - Dave Sim
"Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit… each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest." - Joseph Campbell
"Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will [...]
Denial
"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten." - D. H. Lawrence
"Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish." - Logan Pearsall Smith
Devil
"These days, the wages of sin depend on what kind of deal you make with the devil." - Kara Vichko
"You are permitted in times of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge." - Bulgarian Proverb
"With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it’s not just a [...]
Devils Scripture
"History is the devil's scripture." - Lord Byron
"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." - William Shakespeare
"The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still." - A. W. Tozer
Disciples
"Jesus promised His disciples three things: that they would be entirely fearless, absurdly happy, and that they would get into trouble." - W. Russell Maltby
"Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." - John Lennon
Discovery
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce
"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind." - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Dogs
"REVERENCE, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man." - Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914
"Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be." - Andre Mairaux
"Did you hear about the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac who stays up all night wondering if there really is [...]
Doomed
"I envisioned my circumstance was the result of some child deity with an incredibly short attention span: a demigod whose most frivolous thoughts effortlessly gave birth to universes of which it is hardly aware. Meanwhile, the spontaneous creations, such as myself, are doomed to act out this lord's unconscious fantasies long after it has [...]
Doors
"In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors." - William Blake
"Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, [...]
Doublethink
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." - George Orwell
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald [...]
Dozens
"The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens." - D.H. Lawrence
Drama
"When we are born we cry that we are come.. to this great stage of fools." - William Shakespeare
"Life is the farce which everyone has to perform." - Arthur Rimbaud
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their [...]
Dream
"All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together." - Jack Kerouac
"There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks." - William S. Burroughs
"Maybe we are less than our dreams, but that less would make us more than some Gods [...]
Dungeon
"In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried… prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this… the imagination [...]
Duty
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires [...]
