René Guénon quotes - page 2

René Guénon was a French philosopher and metaphysician known for his writings on traditionalism and esotericism. His works explored the relationship between Eastern and Western spiritual traditions and critiqued modernity. He significantly influenced 20th-century thought on religion, spirituality, and metaphysics. Here are 32 of his quotes:

A community conceived only as the arithmetical sum of its component individuals; a community is, in fact, no more than this once it ceases to be attached to any principle higher than the individuals.

René Guénon

Have we not arrived at that terrible age, announced in the Sacred Books of India, "when the castes shall be mingled, when even the family shall no longer exist?"

René Guénon

Europeans, since the days when they began to believe in "progress" and in "evolution," that is to say since a little more than a century ago, profess to see a sign of inferiority in this absence of change, whereas for our part, we look upon it as a balanced condition which Western civilization has failed to achieve.

René Guénon

[The priesthood] truly plays the role of 'mediator' between heaven and earth, and it is not without reason that in the Western traditions the priesthood in all its plenitude received the symbolic name of 'pontificate', for, as Saint Bernard says, 'the Pontiff, as indicated by the etymology of his name, is a kind of bridge [pont] between God and man.' If one then wished to go back to the primal origin of the priestly and royal powers, one must look to the 'celestial world'.

René Guénon

[T]he revolt of the Kshatriyas prepares the way for that of the Vaishyas and the Shūdras; and so, from one stage to another, we descend at last to the lowest kind of utilitarianism, the negation of all disinterested knowledge (even of the lowest rank) and of all reality beyond the perceptible domain. This is precisely what one witnesses in our own time, where the Western world has nearly arrived at the final stage of this descent which, like the fall of heavy bodies, keeps accelerating.

René Guénon

Among those who in spite of all have kept something of the traditional spirit (and we address them because they are the only ones whose thought could have any value in our eyes), how many envisage the truth for its own sake, in a totally disinterested way, independent of every sentimental preoccupation, of every party or ideological passion, of all concern for domination or proselytism?

René Guénon