Gnosticism Quotes

“Love is an involuntary gift that manifests unplanned.”
― Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

“And becoming aware of one's true inner nature, instinctive gut feelings, is not generally thought by those who experience it to be in conflict with the essence of one's spiritual knowledge, but more of a Gnostic direct experience of the Sacred experienced in the gut or all of nature that is greater than us and is connected to us through the gut instincts.”
― Martha Char Love, What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct

“Our failure is not that we chose earth over heaven: it is that we fail to see the divine in the earth, already active and working, pouring forth grace and spilling glory into our lives. Artists, whether they are professed believers or not, tap into this grace and glory. There is a "terrible beauty" operating throughout creation. If Christ announced his postresurrection reality into the darkness, even into hell, as the Bible and Christian catechism suggests, then, as theologian Abraham Kuyper put it, there is not one inch of earth that Christ does not call "Mine!”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“I devotedly believe that the essence of my being - my spirit - is not truly a part of the universe, it is a part of Chaos. My spirit is a fragment of the Hidden God beyond the nutshell we call the cosmos; thus being trapped in a human body is only a prison in my eyes.”
― Vexior 218

“The resurrection of the body forbids us to despise the material realm.”
― R.J. Rushdoony, Exodus: Commentaries on the Pentateuch

“The separation of the individual from a corporeal relationship with the Soul is mirrored in the separation of the individual from nature. This is perhaps one of the most important spiritual and psychological poisons of modernity: the alienation of the individual from the wilderness of nature. The modern obsession with progress and technology has worked to effectively separate man from the unpredictable and uncontrollable milieu of the wilderness and the concomitant alienation of the Soul from the flesh. The modern mind worships the Techno-God and uses many methods to enforce the separation of the flesh from the Soul. Reconnecting to nature requires only concentrated periods spent in a natural environment instead of living a life entirely immersed in artificial environments Efforts should be made to spend significant time in nature to allow the Sacramental Vision to thrive and organically develop. Without a constant connection to nature, the primordial voice of the Soul will eventually fade into silence. Nature must become a constant companion.”
― Craig Williams, Entering the Desert

“It’s a remarkable experience to ask yourself identity-crisis questions from a comic book movie with a mostly straight face, but I don’t recommend it.”
― Jonathan Talat Phillips, The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic

“Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice.
The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius."
"Quite," Anthony answered.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“Pan only has one will, to get Yahweh to die and Yahweh's world to get absorbed into Chaos.”
― Vexior 218, Panparadox

“Morgause looked up at the old man, her eyes wide in awe.
- Are you so old, Venerable One?
The Merlin smiled down at the girl and said, - Not in my own body. But I have read much in the great hall which is not in this world, there the Record of All Things is written. And also, I was living then. Those who are the Lords of this world permitted me to come back, but in another body of flesh. -”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“Why build entirely new systems for connecting to Christ consciousness when the institutions—whether Methodist, Lutheran, or Baptist—have already been created?”
― Jonathan Talat Phillips, The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic

“Life has been thrown into the world, light into darkness, the soul into the body. It expresses the original violence done to me in making me be where I am and what I am, the passivity of my choice-less emergence into an existing world which I did not make and whose law is not mine”
― Hans Jonas, Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit

“Our God is a three-part being (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Mark T. Barclay-The Missing Red Letters”
― Mark T. Barclay, The Missing Red Letters

“However, ana al-haqq as it stands has raised a few literary questions as well and, within the tradition of mystic poetry, the attitude preserved in Hallaj's expression has given rise to mixed reactions regarding its content. It is held that it is an exaggeration of subjective experience, and ana—the personal "I"—shows leanings toward megalomania and egotism. It is the personal "I" which overshadows al-haqq, and thereby invites total attention to itself. In fact, the personal "I" absorbs al-haqq, and reaches out to the romantic cult of the egostistical sublime. In this context, the truth tends to become subjective and, therefore, relative, and in its social implications it shows the possibility of numerous diversions. Extreme individualism, in contrast to institutionalism, is also held to be related to ana al-haqq. The personal "I" is supposed to be potentionally explosive and destructive for values of the Establishment. A.J. Arberry has summed up the position by saying that Hallaj had dared to declare that his direct awareness of God was for him a clearer proof than both revelation and reason.”
― Gilani Kamran, Ana Al-Haqq Reconsidered

“Passing from the sectaries of the law itself,[the Gnostics] asserted that it was impossible that a religion which consisted only of bloody sacrifices and trifling ceremonies, and whose rewards as well as punishments were all of a carnal and temporal nature, could inspire the love of virtue, or restrain the impetuosity of passion.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1: 180-395

“The gnostic ideal, simply put, is that you really are a displaced part of Heaven, but during this experience of human life, that knowledge eludes you. Momentarily, you've forgotten your true connection and the way to return, so you've actually come back into this life to rescue your authentic self – trapped in your limited perceptions of this world. Within a transformative moment of gnosis, you'll remember who and what you really are, where you really come from, and how to take yourself back home.”
― Robert Kopecky, How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying): Wisdom from a Near Death Survivor

“Ale Sofia, współczująca, ożywiła go cząstką swej duszy...”
― Gustave Flaubert , Quotations by Gustave Flaubert

“God loves 'stuff;' after all He made it”
― Michael Horton

“The hidden influence of such thinking on Protestant Christianity, of course, has been enormous. No Protestant body would professor even consider what the religious humanists said in 1933. Yet on a practical level, a metaphysical doubt is present. When the doubt remains unchallenged, it leads modern Christians into a position very similar to that of the ancient gnostics. If the heresiarchs devised archons to be responsible for the mistakes of the cosmos, thereby free­ing God of responsibility, a scientifically oriented generation has in­terposed its own archons: the big bang, probability, evolution, all of which provide some distance between God and this deficient cosmos.”
― Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics

“If I had been born in the medieval times, my subjective union with God and the Universe would have evoked the rise of another Gnostic religion. But, by the grace of Mother Nature, I am born in an era of Science and Reasoning. Hence, I have dissected my own experience of Absolute Divinity as well as the experiences of all the religious giants in my works, in order to discover the physical truth underneath these apparently supernatural experiences.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“Equally, it does not mean that Christian beliefs cause more distortion than other ideological beliefs. This emerged with particular clarity in engaging with the opinion that Jesus did not exist. This view is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. This is not merely worse than the American Jesus Seminar, it is no better than Christian fundamentalism. It simply has different prejudices.”
― Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of his Life and Teaching

“The appellation of the path as Draconian also indicates its direction; the light esotericism leads to a unity with male gods of the light, like Yahweh or Marduk. The dark esotericism, on the other hand, leads out towards primordial dragon entities such as Leviathan, Tehom or Tiamat, who existed long before the gods of light and who exist in the infinity beyond the divine light. To the initiated adept on the Qliphotic path, the darkness of infinity is a hidden light, so infinitely brighter than the light of the gods that it is thus perceived as darkness.”
― Thomas Karlsson, Qabalah, Qliphoth and Goetic Magic

“Those, then, who run down created existence and vilify the body are wrong; not considering that the frame of man was formed erect for the contemplation of heaven, and that the organization of the senses tends to knowledge; and that the members and parts are arranged for good, not for pleasure. Whence this abode becomes receptive of the soul which is most precious to God; and is dignified with the Holy Spirit through the sanctification of soul and body, perfected with the perfection of the Saviour.”
― Clement of Alexandria, Volume 12. The Writings of Clement of Alexandria

“And Pistis Sophia cried out most exceedingly, she cried to the Light of lights which she had seen from the beginning, in which she had had faith, and uttered this repentance, saying thus:

The first repentance of Sophia. O Light of lights, in whom I have had faith from the beginning, hearken now then, O Light, unto my repentance. Save me, O Light, for evil thoughts have entered into me.”
― G. S. R. Mead

“If the logos had become part of history in this man Jesus, then two dualisms which were fundamental to classical thought were no longer tenable. One was the dualism between the "sensible" and the "intelligible," or--as we might say--between the material and the mental or spiritual.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship

“Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word ‘gnostic’ comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’) that was later declared heretical, didn’t help. Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicity or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated. The biography of St Antony records with approval that he ‘refused to learn to read and write or to join in the silly games of the other little children’. Education and silly games are here bracketed together, and both are put in opposition to holiness. Instead of this, we learn, Antony ‘burned with the desire for God’. That this wasn’t quite true – Antony’s letters reveal a much more careful thinker than this implies – didn’t much matter: it appealed to a powerful ideal. No need to read: give up both books and bread and you will win God’s favour. Even intellectuals were susceptible to this pretty picture: it was hearing about how the simple, unlettered Antony had inspired so many to turn to Christ that led Augustine to start striking himself on the head, tearing his hair and asking, ‘What is wrong with us?’ Ignorance was power.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“[Bóg] jest gnozą, i daje wiedzę.
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Dlatego jego towarzyszka zostaje mu wysłana, a on opuszcza swego ojca i swą matkę. Nasza siostra Sophia, jest tą, która zstąpiła w niewinności, aby naprawić swój błąd. Dlatego została nazwana „Życie” („Zoe”), to znaczy matka żyjących przez Pronoia absolutnej władzy niebios, przez Epinoię, która się objawiła jemu. Przez nią zakosztowali [Adam i Ewa] doskonałej gnozy (gnosis teleios). Bo jej [Sofii] partner nie przyszedł do niej (sam od siebie), ale przyszedł do niej przez Pełnię (pleroma), po to, aby móc naprawić jej brak.”
― Nag Hammadi, Evanglie gnostique de la vérité

“Rzekł Jezus : „Niech ten, który szuka nie ustaje w poszukiwaniu, aż znajdzie. I gdy znajdzie Zadrży, a jeśli zadrży, będzie się dziwił i będzie panował nad Pełnią.”
― Nag Hammadi, Evanglie gnostique de la vérité

“Kto zna Pełnię będąc pozbawionym siebie, cierpi z braku Pełni. Gdy pozwolicie powstać tamtemu, co jest w was, wtedy to, co macie, uratuje was. Jeślì nie istnieje tamto, co jest w was, wtedy to, czego nie macie w sobie, uśmierci was. Kto znalazł siebie samego, tego świat nie jest wart.”
― Nag Hammadi, Evanglie gnostique de la vérité