Hermes Trismegistus Quotes

Such a person does not cease longing after insatiable appetites, struggling in the darkness without satisfaction. This tortures him and makes the fire grow upon him all the more.

O ye people, earth-born folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness and sleep and ignorance of God, be sober now,cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamored by irrational sleep!

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.
Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.

But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?

No eyes will raise to heaven. The pure will be thought insane and the impure will be honoured as wise. The madman will be believed brave, and the wicked esteemed as good.

65. The generation of man is corruption; the corruption of man is the beginning of generation.

76. Heaven is the first element.

As above, so below. As within, so without. Originated by Hermes TRISMEGISTUS!

Birth is not the beginning of life - only of an individual awareness. Change into another state is not death - only the ending of this awareness.

The hearer must be of one mind with the speaker, my son, and of one spirit as well; he must have hearing quicker than the speech of the speaker.

But this discourse, expressed in our paternal language, keeps clear the meaning of its words. The very quality of speech and of the Egyptian words have in themselves the energy of the object they speak of.

Therefore, my king, in so far as you have the power (who are all powerful), keep the discourse uninterpreted, lest mysteries of such greatness come to the Greeks, lest the extravagant, flaccid and (as it were) dandified Greek idiom extinguish something stately and concise, the energetic idiom of usage. For the Greeks have empty speeches, O king, that are energetic only in what they demonstrate, and this is the philosophy of the Greeks, an inane foolosophy of speeches. We, by contrast, use not speeches but sounds that are full of action. (Chapter XVI)

Know, O man, that Light is thine heritage. Know that darkness is only a veil. Sealed in thine heart is brightness eternal, waiting the moment of freedom to conquer, waiting to rend the veil of the night.

Some I found who had conquered the ether. Free of space were they while yet they were men. Using the force that is the foundation of ALL things, far in space constructed they a planet, drawn by the force that flows through the ALL; condensing, coalescing the ether into forms, that grew as they willed. Outstripping in science, they, all of the races, mighty in wisdom, sons of the stars.

Long time I paused, watching their wisdom.
Saw them create from out of the ether cities gigantic of rose and gold. Formed forth from the primal element, base of all matter, the ether far flung. Far in the past, they had conquered the ether, freed themselves from the bondage of toil; formed in heir mind only a picture and swiftly created, it grew.

Forth then, my soul sped, throughout the Cosmos, seeing ever, new things and old; learning that man is truly space-born, a Sun of the Sun, a child of the stars.

This cosmos is large, then, and no body is larger?” “Agreed.” “And is it densely packed? For it has been filled with many other large bodies or, rather, with all the bodies that exist.” “So it is.” “But is the cosmos a body?” “A body, yes.” “And a moved body?” [3] “Certainly.” “The place in which it moves, then, how large must it be, and what is its nature? Is it not larger by far so as to sustain continuity of motion and not hold back its movement lest the moved be crowded and confined?

The excellence of the soul is understanding; for the man who understands is conscious, devoted, and already godlike.

Philosophy is nothing else than striving through constant contemplation and saintly piety to attain knowledge of God.

The punishment of desire is the agony of unfulfillment