Frithjof Schuon quotes - page 2

The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason. (Frithjof Schuon)
One of the effects, among others, of modern science has been that of mortally wounding religion by posing in concrete terms problems which esoterism alone can resolve and which remain unresolved because esoterism is not heeded and is heeded less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy, and this obliges it to falsify its own perspective imperceptibly and disavow itself more and more; its doctrine is certainly not affected, but false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it insidiously "from within", as witnessed by modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling of the liturgy, Teilhardian Darwinism or the "sacred art" of surrealist and "abstract" persuasion. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Religion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language; now though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is nonetheless accessible through faith, which is, for the great majority, the only possible mode of participation in the Divine Truths. As for intellectual knowledge, which proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, it goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, it penetrates its internal dimension, that is, the infinite Truth that dominates all forms. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Without religion − or without authentic religion − a human collectivity cannot survive in the long run; that is, it cannot remain human. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Let us specify that the possible gaps in the human mind are due, not to fortuitous causes, but to the very conditions of the "dark age", the kali-yuga, which has as an effect − among other modes of decadence − a progressive weakening of pure intellection and of the ascending tendencies of soul; whence the necessity of the religious revelations, and whence also the problematical phenomenon of gratuitous and divergent philosophies. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Revelation is the fulgurant irruption of a knowledge that comes, not from an individual or collective subconscious, but on the contrary from a supra-consciousness, which though latent in all beings nonetheless immensely surpasses its individual and psychological crystallizations. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
There is no access to the Heart without the virtues. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
A symbolism is abstract inasmuch as it signifies a principial reality; it is concrete inasmuch as it communicates the nature of this reality, that is, inasmuch as it renders it present to our experience. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Metaphysics intends to furnish dialectically only reference points; it offers − and this is its entire reason for being − a system of perfectly sufficient keys, through a language that cannot be other than indicative and elliptical. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Metaphysics is the science of the Absolute or the true nature of things. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
There is no theophany that is not prefigured in the very constitution of the human being, made as it is "in the image of God"; and esoterism aims at actualizing what is divine in this mirror of God that is man. (Frithjof Schuon)
Esoteric truth is a two-edged sword: there are men who lose God because they are ignorant of this truth, which alone would save them, and there are others who think they understand it and forge for themselves an illusory and arrogant faith, which they put practically in place of God. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Sacred art helps man find his own center, that kernel whose nature is to love God. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Happiness is religion and character; faith and virtue. It is a fact that man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself, to free himself. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
In order to be happy, man must have a center; now this center is above all the certitude of the One. The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery. To be man is to be at the center; it is to be center. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
To accept a trial is to thank God for it, with the understanding that it permits us a victory, a detachment with regard to the world and with regard to the ego. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Every injustice that we suffer at the hands of men is at the same time a trial that comes to us from God. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
To have a sense of the sacred is to be aware that all qualities or values not only proceed from the Infinite but also attract towards It. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
The sense of the sacred is the capacity to perceive, or feel, the presence of the Celestial in earthly symbols, whether sacramental or natural; and this implies the sense of dignity as well as of devotion. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
Love of the sacred implies love of God, and inversely, the sacred is the perfume of Heaven. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
The sacred is an apparition of the Center, it immobilizes the soul and turns it towards the Inward. (Frithjof Schuon)
In the elementary sense of the word, faith is our assent to a truth that transcends us; but spiritually speaking, it is our assent, not to transcendent concepts, but to immanent realities, or to Reality as such; now this Reality is our very substance. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
The fact that spiritual realism, or faith, pertains to the intelligence of the heart and not to that of the mind, enables one to understand that in spirituality, the moral qualification takes precedence over the intellectual qualification, and by far. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
If faith is a mystery, it is because its nature is inexpressible in the measure that it is profound, for it is not possible to convey fully by words this vision which is still blind, and this blindness which already sees. View quote
Frithjof Schuon
What the virtues are to existential perfection, truths are to intellectual perfection; virtue is essentially simplicity, inward beauty, generosity, whereas truth, for its part, lies entirely in the discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Absolute and the contingent. View quote
Frithjof Schuon