Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
From the standpoint of total truth is a thousand times better to believe that God created the world in six days than it is to know the distance from one nebula to another while not knowing that phenomena merely serve to manifest a transcendent Reality.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Space symbolizes origin and immutability; time is decadence, which carries us away from the origin while at the same time leading us toward the Messiah, the great Liberator, and toward the meeting with God.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Even believers themselves are for the most part too indifferent to feel concretely that God is not only “above” us “in Heaven”, but also “ahead” of us, at the end of the world or even simply at the end of our life.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The world will be submerged and swallowed up one day by an unimaginable irruption of the purely miraculous — unimaginable because surpassing all human experiences and standards of measurement.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
In those ancient times the rigors of earthly existence, including the wickedness of men, were on the whole accepted as an inexorable fatality, and their abolition was with good reason believed to be impossible
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Miseries, whose deep-seated cause is always the violation of a celestial norm as well as indifference toward Heaven and our final ends, are there to restrain the greedy illusions of men.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
In our day there is a tendency to reduce happiness to the level of economic well-being, but what is lost sight of when this outlook is projected into the past is that a contact with nature and natural things are factors essential to human happiness.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
In a traditional climate men live as if they are suspended from an ideal and invisible prototype, with which they are seeking to be reunited as their particular situations permit and according to their sincerity and vocation.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Strictly speaking, only the hermit is absolutely legitimate, for man was created alone and dies alone; the hermit represents a principle and is therefore a symbol. Holy solitude can and must find a place in all human situations.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The monk or hermit—and every contemplative, even a king— lives as if in an antechamber of Heaven; on this very earth and within his mortal body he has attached himself to Heaven and enclosed himself in a prolongation of the celestial states.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Religions can reform the individual man with his consent—and it is never the function of religion to make up for the absence of this consent.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Respect for the human person must not open the door to a dictatorship of error and baseness, to the crushing of quality by quantity, to general corruption and the loss of cultural values.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The goal of religion is to transmit to man a symbolic, yet adequate, image of the reality that concerns him, and to provide him with the means of surpassing himself and realizing his highest destiny; this destiny can never be of this world.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Traditional civilizations, despite their inevitable imperfections, are like sea walls built to stem the rising tide of worldliness, error, subversion, of the fall that is ceaselessly renewed.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Miracles in the usual sense of the word are in effect only particular variants of the initial— and everywhere present—miracle that is the fact of existence.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence. With intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Even when a man still believes, he forgets more and more what religion really demands: he is astonished at the calamities of this world, without its occurring to him that they may be acts of grace since—like death—they rend the veil of earthly illusion.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Many people imagine that purgatory or hell are for those who have killed, stolen, lied, committed fornication, and so on. In reality the soul is consigned to the flames for not having loved God or for not having loved Him enough.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Many of the characteristics of the civilizations of antiquity are explained by the fact that in the beginning the celestial Law was of an adamantine hardness while at the same time life still retained something of the celestial.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The sage or the saint has an inward access to concrete Truth; the simplest formulation (doubtless the most “naive” for some tastes) can be the threshold of a Knowledge as complete and profound as possible.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of higher (and supra-sensory) degrees of Existence; it is even in fact a distant reverberation of those degrees.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence. With intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
We are like foam ceaselessly renewed on the ocean of existence. But since God has put Himself into this foam, it is destined to become a sea of stars at the time of the final crystallization of spirits.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The tiny system of images (the ego) must become, when its terrestrial contingency is left behind, a star immortalized in the halo of Divinity. Beyond the stars burns the Sun of the Self in its blazing transcendence and in its infinite peace.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The sin of Adam consists in effect of having wished to superimpose something on existence, and existence was beatitude; Adam thereby lost this beatitude and was engulfed in the anxious and deceptive turmoil of superfluous things.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
Goodness is in the very substance of the Universe, and for that reason it penetrates right into the matter we know, "accursed" though that matter be.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The sage or the saint has an inward access to concrete Truth; the simplest formulation (doubtless the most “naive” for some tastes) can be the threshold of a Knowledge as complete and profound as possible.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
The mitigation of moral laws can represent an intrinsic superiority only on two conditions: firstly that it confers a concrete advantage on society, and secondly that it be not obtained at the cost of that which gives meaning to life.
Traditional Quotes and Symbols:
In the beginning the celestial Law was of an adamantine severity while at the same time life still retained something of the celestial. The celestial Law becomes less demanding as the end of our cycle approaches; Clemency grows as man becomes weaker.