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We defend what we cannot do without. Christ defended nothing, since there was nothing he could not do without. Locks, like weapons, are not the contrivances of Christian minds. But locks and weapons go together. Knights armored themselves for battle to lock away their flesh. Life and body are mere possessions, but, of possessions, the most closely held; the most difficult to sacrifice.

The mind in you is the same enlightened mind in The Buddha, but it clings.

I explained myself to the skeptics and they called me a believer. I explained myself to the believers and they called me a skeptic. I don't know what I am.

What a man allies himself to by thought in this life, he allies himself to by birth in the next.

Mercury is man. Witness how, with winged-feet, the man with mind mounts up, and taking hold of the corner of the cloak of a god, translates all he sees in his wild flight; half-carried, half-dragged, half-mad across the sky.

There is nothing so low that it may not be tied, and thereby allied, to something higher. The plot of the mystics was never to kill, but merely to let sleep the senses for a time, in order to recover the better use of them. That heaven may be present on earth, and spirit manifested in matter, is witnessed by those who have accomplished this great work; anchoring, and ultimately uniting, what is coarse with what is fine. They have truly delighted themselves in the eternal wonders of the spirit, and transcended the petty vicissitudes of the flesh, who no longer distinguish between the spiritual and material, nor find any but eternal wonders in this world.


All things external are only the visible transmissions of their internal compliments. Even those things which are said not to exist, by this strange alchemy, are wedded to verities within. There is nothing a man may put his hand to, however lifeless and cold, which did not first arise, red-hot, from the furnace of his own beating heart.

Nothing will wake the people up. I have had to learn this. There are no large-scale victories. There are only skirmishes. Small advances and small retreats. History, like all big things, makes wide turns.

If something is intensely beautiful, it beautifies all that surrounds it. Nothing is so prosaic that it may not appear in a stranger, more poetical light, when placed beside an article of overwhelming sublimity. The insects are ennobled by the flowers. The rags which cover a beautiful peasant girl partake somehow of her charms, and we may even come to imagine that they suit her, in an odd way which no finery ever could. Might it not be that evil, too, somehow does justice to the benevolence of God? We may try to imagine Christ seated upon an immaculate throne, attended by the most gorgeous angels, yet, it seems that he is never so much "at home" as when he is on earth, condescending before some dangerous or leprous wretch. Good is the portrait, and evil what frames it. Not by coincidence do carpenters make both crosses and frames. 

Sin is the manifestation in reality of a perception rooted in unreality. It is life lived according to the hallucination.

The fiction of sin is passed through the blood. We take it in with mother's milk.

Civilization is not "the world". It is the kingdom of man, merely, and not of God. But when men began to think of THEIR world as THE world, they fell prey to the lie of sin; they replaced the world as God had made it with an idol of their own invention. Surely, man is free to invent his world, but he must never forget that it is a world of his own invention, merely. He must never come to live in this world as if it were made by God; then, the invention would become an idol, and man would become trapped within it, as within a great illusion. Civilization is not the world as God made it, and we are not the men He made, to the extent that we are civilized men. This is the world our forefathers made, and we are the unfortunates born into it; successively weakened and domesticated through numerous generations of dependency upon mortal inventions. God did not make us sinners. We bred ourselves for sin.

Our speech must be creative. Otherwise, we speak only of a created world, a world of effects. Unconsciously, we recreate that world.

Life (or Incarnation) is a doomed experiment, which God endures only for the sake of man's free will. However, the very failure of the experiment, on one level, must signify a paradoxical success on another, higher level. As the designs of men are brought to nothing, the masterworks of God are brought to light. Only the soul that wanders experiences return.

The last, most feeble efforts we make are worth more than all our previous efforts combined, as the few coins given to charity by the poor woman in the gospel were greater in the eyes of God than the more sizable (though not more generous) donations of the rich; however much they may part with, they retain more than what is reasonable for an individual to keep. It's not what we give, but what we hold back, that really counts.