"Gnostic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 short of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... satirist sought to amuse the public by sketching 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 to him with wonderful ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley |
