Eliphas Levi citations (23 citations)

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magi Part I: The Doctrine of Transcendental Magic By Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant), Translated by A. E. Waite, England, Rider & Company, England, 1896, p.3

“Progress is a possibility for the animal: it can be broken in, tamed and trained; but it is not a possibility for the fool, because the fool thinks he has nothing to learn. It is his place to dictate to others and put them right, and so it is impossible to reason with him. He will laugh you to scorn in saying that what he does not understand is not a meaningful proposition. 'Why don't I understand it, then?', he asks you, with marvellous impudence. To tell him it is because he is a fool would only be taken as an insult, so there is nothing you can say in reply. Everybody else sees it quite clearly, but he will never realize it.

Here then, at the outset, is a potent secret which is inaccessible to the majority of people; a secret which they will never guess and which it would be useless to tell them: the secret of their own stupidity.”

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Eliphas Levi

Book Two: The Royal Mystery or the Art of Subduing the Powers, Chapter XII: The Terrible Secret
The Great Secret: or Occultism Unveiled

“Happy in the time of Jesus were those who wept! Happy, now, are those who can laugh, because laughter is the attribute of man, as the great prophet of the Renaissance, Rabelais, said. Laughter is forbearance; laughter is philosophy. The heavens clear when they laugh, and the great secret of divine omnipotence resides in an eternal smile!”

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Eliphas Levi

Book Two: The Royal Mystery or the Art of Subduing the Powers, Chapter V: The Outer Darkness
The Great Secret: or Occultism Unveiled

“Those who have found this middle point are true and wonderworking adepts of science and reason. They are masters of the wealth of worlds, confidants and friends of the princes of heaven itself, and Nature obeys them because they will what is willed by the law which is the motive power of Nature. It is this which the Saviour of the world spoke of as the Kingdom of Heaven; this also is the Sanctum Regnum of the Holy Kabalah. It is the Crown and Ring of Solomon ; it is the Sceptre of Joseph which the stars obeyed in heaven and the harvests on earth.”

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Eliphas Levi

Source: The History Of Magic (1860), p.501

“Magic is the science of the ancient magi; and the Christian religion, which silenced the counterfeit oracles and put a stop to the illusions of false gods, does, this notwithstanding, revere those mystic kings who came from the East, led by a star, to adore the Saviour of the world in His cradle. They are elevated by tradition to the rank of kings, because magical initiation constitutes a true royalty; because also the great art of the magi is characterised by all adepts as the Royal Art, as the Holy Kingdom — Sanctum Regnum. The star which conducted the pilgrims is the same Burning Star which is met with in all initiations. For alchemists it is the sign of the quintessence, for magicians it is the Great Arcanum, for Kabalists the sacred pentagram.”

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Eliphas Levi

Introduction
The History Of Magic (1860)

“It can have no analogy in fact with the descriptions of those who know nothing of the subject; furthermore, it is not to be represented as this or that by any person whomsoever: it is that which it is, drawing from itself only, even as mathematics do, for it is the exact and absolute science of Nature and her laws.”

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Eliphas Levi

Introduction
The History Of Magic (1860)

“Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people — with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice — that Magic is an absurdity.”

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Eliphas Levi

Introduction
The History Of Magic (1860)

“Bloody and hideous facts; acts of revolting superstition, arrests, and executions of stupid ferocity. "Burn every body!" the Inquisition seemed to say — God will easily sort out His own! Poor fools, hysterical women, and idiots were roasted alive, without mercy, for the crime of "magic."”

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Eliphas Levi livre Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie

But, at the same time, how many great culprits escaped this unjust and sanguinary justice! This is what Bodin makes us fully appreciate.

Quoted in Isis Unveiled, by H.P. Blavatsky, Vol. II, Chapter III (1877)
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856)

“Magic is an instrument of divine goodness or demoniac pride, but it is the annihilation of earthly joys and the pleasures of mortal life.”

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Eliphas Levi

“Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act.”

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Eliphas Levi

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians

“ALL religions have preserved the remembrance of a primitive book, written in hieroglyphs by the sages of the earliest epoch of the world. [...] The tradition in question rests altogether on the one dogma of Magic: the visible is for us the proportional measure of the invisible.”

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Eliphas Levi

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, H.L. Mencken (Translator), The Anti-Christ, Chicago, Sharp Press, 1999, p. 144.</

“Magic is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith; the true Magi are Men-Gods, in virtue of their intimate union with the divine principle.”

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Eliphas Levi

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: [Lévi, Éliphas, Blavatsky, H. P., Paradoxes of the Highest Science, 2007, Wildside Press LLC, 9781434401069, 15, https://books.google.com/books?id=oIglEl6BJFoC&q=The%20Paradoxes%20of%20the%20Highest%20Science&pg=PA5]

“To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage.”

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Eliphas Levi

Source: Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians

“In Black Magic, the Devil means the employment of the Grand Magical Agent for a wicked purpose by a perverted Will.”

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Eliphas Levi

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, Eliphas Levi, Translated by W. Wynn Westcott, London, George Redway, 1896, p. 60.

“There is a true and a false science, a Divine and an Infernal Magic – in other words, one which is delusive and tenebrous.”

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Eliphas Levi

“Magic, or rather magical power, comprehends two things, a science and a force: without the force the science is nothing, or rather it is a danger.”

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Eliphas Levi

“Necromancy, and Goetia, which is Evil Magic, do produce such shells and demons, apparitions of deceit.”

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Eliphas Levi

Miscellaneous Quotes On the Subjects of Magic and Magicians
Source: The Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum, Eliphas Levi, Translated by W. Wynn Westcott, London, George Redway, 1896, p. 51.