“To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men.”

Crossing the Rubicon
Focus Fourteen

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.

Fictional sayings

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)
Context: So it is that the laws most binding us as a people are laws of the spirit—proclaimed in church and synagogue and mosque. These are the laws that truly declare the eternal equality of all men, of all races, before the man-made laws of our land. And we are profoundly aware that—in the world—we can claim the trust of hundreds of millions of people, across Africa and Asia—only as we ourselves hold high the banner of justice for all.

"The Beetle and the Fly," http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/01/17/the-beetle-and-the-fly/ (January 17, 2014)

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 15

Introduction, Lesson I: Definition and Sphere of the Science.
Elementary Lessons on Logic (1870)

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

Misnad al-Imām al-Jawād, p. 244
Religious Wisdom