Herbert Butterfield Quotes

I'm not a magician. I'am an alchemyst, a man of science, though perhaps not the science you would be familiar with.

Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements.

I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose.

This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and chemist of the medicine.

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher's Stone.

Every time you write anything, at least half your readers are going to disagree with you. A big part of sports writing is how you respond to that tension.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

That's always been my interest - things of the unknown.

I do not worship the devil. But magic does intrigue me. Magic of all kinds. I bought Crowley's house to go up and write in. The thing is, I just never get up that way. Friends live there now.

We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

The secrets of alchemy exist to transform mortals from a state of suffering and ignorance to a state of enlightenment and bliss.

The psychology of the alchemist is that of reveries trying to constitute themselves in experiments on the exterior world. A double vocabulary must be established between reverie and experiment. The exaltation of the names of substances is the preamble to experiments on the "exalted" substances.

Hermeticism is the science of nature hidden in the hieroglyphics and symbols of the ancient world. It is the search for the principle of life, along with the dream (for those who have not yet achieved it) of accomplishing the great work, that is the reproduction by man of the divine, natural fire which creates and recreates beings.

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.

In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history.

Many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics.

I must make MAGICK the essential factor in the life of ALL. In presenting this book to the world, I must then explain and justify my position by formulating a definition of MAGICK and setting forth its main principles in such a way that ALL may understand instantly that their souls, their lives, in every relation with every other human being and every circumstance, depend upon MAGICK and the right comprehension and right application thereof.

"A hundred years ago, in this country, we were more comfortable with these discussions [of past lives, touching the spiritual world, collective unconsciousl] than we are today. I think part of that is that we have gotten addicted to the same serum that I'm taking, which is the belief that the answers are always going to be right there in front of us. And sometimes ya gotta take that leap."

I've come to realize that you're going to get criticized no matter what. Somebody will always hate what you write, especially if you write humor for a fairly broad audience. Somebody will always find it not funny and declare you're not funny anymore. And sometimes people are just crazy.

This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit.

In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.