Everything lives by movement, everything is maintained by equilibrium, and harmony results from the analogy of contraries; this law is the form of forms.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of movement and balance in life, suggesting that harmony arises from the interplay of opposites.
Eliphas Levi's quote suggests that all living things thrive through constant movement and that a state of balance is essential for sustaining life. The idea of harmony, which he describes as resultant from the relationships between opposing forces, underscores a fundamental law of existence where contradictions coalesce to create a stable and dynamic reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of balance in personal and professional life.
What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.
All miracles are promised to faith, and what is faith except the audacity of will which does not hesitate in the darkness, but advances towards the light in spite of all ordeals, and surmounting all obstacles?
Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear YOU. Say to suffering, 'I will that you shall become a pleasure,' and it will prove to be such-- and even more than a pleasure, it will be a blessing.
To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage.
When we love, we see the infinite in the finite. We find the Creator in the creation.
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.
The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.
The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.
And there are loners in rural communities who, at the equinox, are said to don new garments and stroll down to the cities, where great beasts await them, fat and docile.
Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.
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