Frithjof Schuon quotes
Frithjof Schuon was a Swiss philosopher, metaphysician, and spiritual writer renowned for his work on comparative religion. His teachings emphasized the transcendent unity of religions and the perennial philosophy underlying spiritual traditions. He is regarded as a major figure of the Traditionalist School and a profound exponent of metaphysical thought. Here are 112 of his quotes:
Virtue is the conformity of the soul to the divine Model and to the spiritual work; conformity or participation. The essence of the virtues is emptiness before God, which permits the divine Qualities to enter the heart and radiate in the soul. Virtue is the exteriorization of the pure heart.
Frithjof Schuon
The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute, and consequently in the integrality and depth of this consciousness; having lost sight of it by plunging himself into the world of phenomena viewed as such, man needs to be reminded of it by the celestial Message. This Message comes finally from "himself", not of course from his empirical "I" but from his immanent Selfhood, which is that of God and without which there would be no "I", whether human, angelic or other; the credibility of the Message results from the fact that it is what we are, both within ourselves and beyond ourselves. In the depths of transcendence is immanence, and in the depths of immanence, transcendence.
Frithjof Schuon
The desire to vanquish faults because it is "I" who have them is ineffectual, since it falls within the same category as the faults themselves. Indeed, every fault is a form of egoism or even pride. We must tend towards Perfection because we understand it and therefore love it, and not because we desire that our ego should be perfect. In other terms, we must love and realize a virtue because it is true and beautiful, and not because it would become us if we possessed it; and we must hate and fight against a fault because it is false and ugly, and not because it is ours and because it disfigures us. To possess a virtue is first and foremost to be without the fault which is contrary to it, for God created us virtuous. He created us in His image; faults are superimposed. Moreover it is not we who possess virtue, it is virtue which possesses us.
Frithjof Schuon
The saint is the man who acts as if he had died and returned to life; having already ceased to be "himself" in the earthly sense, he has no intention whatever of returning to that dream, but maintains himself in a kind of wakefulness, which the world with its narrowness and impurities cannot understand.
Frithjof Schuon
It is appropriate to distinguish between a knowledge that is active and mental, namely doctrinal discernment, by which we become conscious of the Truth, and a knowledge that is passive, receptive and cardiac, namely invocatory contemplation, by which we assimilate what we have become aware of.
Frithjof Schuon
