Gnostic Quotes
What’s the meaning of life? Aphorisms, maxims and quotations expressing the paradoxical essence of gnosticism.
Samael
"Do you believe man is created in God's image?" "Yes," Fat said, "but the creator deity, not the true God." "What?" Fat said, "That's Yaldabaoth. Sometimes called Samael, the blind god. He's deranged." "What the hell are you talking about?" - Philip K. Dick, Valis, pub. A.D. 1981
"One problem with Yahweh, as they [...]
Scapegoat
"The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert, and so on." - Noam Chomsky
"In religion, it is not the sycophants or those who cling most faithfully to the status quo who are [...]
Science
"There is reality behind the world as it appears to us, possibly a many-layered reality, of which the appearances are the outermost layers. What the great scientist does is boldly to guess, daringly to conjecture, what these inner realities are like. This is akin to myth making." - Karl Popper
"I would not [...]
Secrecy
"Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love… The purpose of life is to recieve, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by [...]
Secrets
"Our cause is a secret within a secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a secret that is veiled by a secret." - Ja'far as-Sadiq, sixth Imam d.765 A.D.
Seed
"'What is a human being, then?' 'A seed.' 'A… seed?' 'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree'" - David Zindell, The Broken God
"You never know how many apples there are in a seed." - Unknown
"What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A [...]
Seeing
"If God dropped acid, would he see people?" - Steven Wright
"People only see what they are prepared to see." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." - Henri L. Bergson
"I shut my eyes in order to see." - Paul Gauguin
[...]
Self
"…nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is…" - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
"One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star." - G.K.Chesterton
Self-deception
"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it." - George Bernard Shaw
"No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself." - Greville
Self-preservation
"A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Senses
"There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses." - Diane Ackerman
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." - Oscar Wilde
Sex
"Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you won't either." - Joseph Fischer
"I believe that sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic." - Woody Allen
"Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation… the other eight are unimportant." - Henry Miller [...]
Sex Life
"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life." - Andrew Lias
"There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror." - W. Somerset Maugham [...]
Sexual Art
"Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp." - Jean Dubuffet
"To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination." - George Jean Nathan
Shamans
"You're sitting quietly in your yurt, minding your own business, when suddely a hideous four-headed spirit monster blasts it's way through the door flap, grabs you by the neck, yanks you up through the smoke-hole into some dreary realm, where it proceeds to slap you around, rip you apart, dip you in a foul-smelling [...]
Silence
"All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn." - Iris Murdoch, 1919-1999
"Let us be silent that we may hear the whispers of the gods." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882
Sin
"The sinning is the best part of repentance." - Arabian Proverb
"Tis a good, loving act to be a sinner, for a sinner is the true savior of mankind." - T.F. Powys
"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?" - Jules Feiffer
"If [...]
Sincerity
"Only dull and impotent artists screen their work with sincerity. In art there is need for truth, not sincerity." - Kasimir Malevich
Sinners & Saints
"The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future." - Oscar Wilde
"Born a saint, die a sinner - born a sinner, die a saint." - Doug Horton
"The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror [...]
Slavery
"Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model." - Vincent Van Gogh
"As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth." - Mikhail A. Bakunin, God and the State
Sleep
"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep." - Gilbert K. Chesterton
"Everyone [...]
Snakes
"What is this man? A ball of wild snakes, which rarely enjoy rest from each other: so they go forth singly and seek prey in the world." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part One, Speech Six, pub. A.D. 1892
Solipsism
"We are justified in asserting that the whole of the objective world, so boundless in space, so infinite in time, so unfathomable in its perfection, is really only a certain movement of affection of the pulpy mass in the skull." - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, pub. A.D. 1819
"Everything [...]
Spaceship Earth
"The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: An instruction book didn't come with it." - R. Buckminster Fuller
"Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you're alive, it isn't." - Richard Bach
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." - Marshall [...]
Spinal Cord
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." - Albert Einstein
Spirit
"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." - Ralph Waldo [...]
Stairs
"God hath placed a ladder before us: we must climb it, step by step.
You have feet: why pretend to be lame? You have hands: why conceal the fingers that grip?" - Rumi, "Faith and Works," from Reynold A. Nicholson's Rumi: Poet and Mystic, p.69, pub. A.D. 1995
"We have come [...]
Stars
"We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars." - Alan Chadwick
"Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at [the] stars." [...]
Stupidity
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say that there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is [...]
Suffering
"What was hard to suffer is sweet to remember." - Seneca
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full." - Marcel Proust
Sunday
"A Christian is a man who feels repentance on Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday." - Thomas Ybarra
"Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure." [...]
Sunshine
"You can always find the sun within yourself if you will only search." - Maxwell Maltz
"When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing." - Pablo Picasso
Surrealists
"If someone were to prove to me - right this minute - that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior." - Luis Bunuel
"To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always [...]
Symbols
"Words are symbols. All I’m doing is jumbling the symbols in your brain. Everything is symbolic. Symbols are just connections in your brain. Even your body is a symbol." - THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN THE WORLD, An Audience with Charles Manson, Rolling Stone, June 1970
Systems
"Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized." - Louis Aragon, 1897-1982
"That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up." - Thomas Paine
"I [...]
