"Gnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it was based upon traditions of the past, and, of course, the possibility remains that it might have been based upon some earlier work. With regard to the antiquity of the planetary sigils, Mr MATHERS notes "that, among the Gnostic talismans in the British Museum, there is a ring of copper with the sigils of Venus, which are exactly the same as those given by mediaeval writers ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... the highest magistrate in heaven, whom the gnostic Valentine calls a godlike angel, and of whom the rabbis said, "His name is like unto the name of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic philosophy; ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... facts relating to the reception of the Fourth Gospel in the second century. Its theology is stamped on the teaching of orthodox apologists; its authority is quoted for the speculative tenets of the manifold Gnostic sects, Basilideans, Valentinians, Ophites; its narrative is employed even by a Judaising writer like the author of the Clementines. The phenomena which confront us in the last quarter of the second century are inexplicable, except on the supposition that the Gospel had had a long previous history. ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... Apollonius, claiming even a higher mission from Heaven than Vespasian was granting to him, answered, with as much arrogance as flattery, "I have myself already made you emperor." With the intimacy between Vespasian and Apollonius begins the use of gnostic emblems on the Alexandrian coins. The imperial pupil was not slow in learning from such a master; and the people were as ready to believe in the emperor's miracles as in the philosopher's. As Vespasian was walking through ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... because of this, And wars will come in its despite. It's noon on the world now; blackest night Will follow soon. And men will miss The meaning, Lord! There will be strife 'Twixt Montanist and Ebionite, Gnostic, Mithraist, Manichean, 'Twixt Christian and the Saracen. There will be war to win the place Where you bend death to sovereign life. Armed kings will battle for the grace Of rulership, for power and gold In the name of Jesus. Men will hold Conclaves ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... sect founded in 1843, their doctrines a mixture of pantheistic with Gnostic and Buddhist beliefs; adverse to polygamy, concubinage, and divorce; insisted on the emancipation of women; have suffered from persecution, but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... papist. Jew, Hebrew, Rabbinist, Rabbist[obs3], Sadducee; Babist[obs3], Motazilite; Mohammedan, Mussulman, Moslem, Shiah, Sunni, Wahabi, Osmanli. Brahmin[obs3], Brahman[obs3]; Parsee, Sufi, Buddhist; Magi, Gymnosophist[obs3], fire worshiper, Sabian, Gnostic, Rosicrucian &c. Adj. heterodox, heretical; unorthodox, unscriptural, uncanonical; antiscriptural[obs3], apocryphal; unchristian, antichristian[obs3]; schismatic, recusant, iconoclastic; sectarian; dissenting, dissident; secular &c, (lay) 997. pagan; heathen, heathenish; ethnic, ethnical; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... gratify that disposition and save their consistency, by declaring that even the simplest act of sensation contains two terms and a relation—the sensitive subject, the sensigenous object, and that masterful entity, the Ego. From which great triad, as from a gnostic Trinity, emanates an endless procession of other logical shadows and all the Fata Morgana of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be satisfied ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Theological Polemics—disputed by Harnack, Bishop Lightfoot has dealt with the subject on its positive and negative sides respectively. The positive side yields results of real importance in attestation of the date of the letters. The heresy combated by Ignatius is a type of Gnostic Judaism, the Gnostic element manifesting itself in a sharp form of Docetism. This marked type of Docetism, far from being a difficulty, is an indication of early date, since the tendency of Docetism was to mitigation, as time went ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... the career of an individual whom he had himself heard and seen, [11:2] and who must have been well known to many of his readers. About the middle of the second century the Church was sorely troubled by false teachers, especially of the Gnostic type; and it may have been that some adventurer, of popular gifts and professing great zeal in the Christian cause, contrived to gather around him a number of deluded followers, who, for a time, adhered ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... fragmentary notes, traditions and sayings which had been taught him, and made out of them a continuous history. Strauss pronounced it to be a controversial work, written late in the second century after Christ, by a profound theologian of the Greek Gnostic and anti-Jewish school, whose design was not to add another to the existing biographies of Christ, not to represent him as a real man, nor to give an account of any human life, but to produce an elaborate theological ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of it had better be expurgated. The Apocrypha was a favourite work, but above all I loved the Revelations, a work which, I may say by the way, is still a treasure to be investigated as regards the marvellous mixture of Neo-Platonic, later Egyptian (or Gnostic), and even Indian Buddhistic ideas therein. Well, I had learned from it a word which St. John applies (to my mind very vulgarly and much too frequently) to the Scarlet Lady of Babylon or Rome. What this word meant I did not know, but this I understood, that ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... crusades, some sparks of curiosity and reason were rekindled in the Western world: the heresy of Bulgaria, the Paulician sect, was successfully transplanted into the soil of Italy and France; the Gnostic visions were mingled with the simplicity of the gospel; and the enemies of the clergy reconciled their passions with their conscience, the desire of freedom with the profession of piety. [19] The trumpet ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Taylor shows that the Church, A.D. 300, was essentially corrupt in doctrine and practice; that the Romish Church was rather an improvement on it; that Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory, and Athanasius are full of false doctrine; and that a Gnostic theology, a Pagan asceticism, and a corrupt morality prevailed in the Church in those ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the welfare of individual wearers. The idea very probably originated with the Gnostics of the East, who engraved stones with mystic figures believed to impart good luck or to keep off evil influences. So completely had this belief gained hold on all classes, that a Gnostic gem set as a ring was found on the finger of the skeleton of an ecclesiastic, in the Cathedral of Chichester, "affording indubitable evidence that these relics were cherished in the Middle Ages by those whose express duty it was to reprove ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... enough in it to be divine," said Rose, taking it from Lu's hand and bringing it back to me. "All those very Gnostic deities who assisted at Creation. You are not afraid that the imprisoned things work their spells upon you? The oracle declares it suits your cousin best," he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various |
