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A Blavatsky Quotation Book: being an Extract for each Day of the Year

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January

January 1

Nature gives up her innermost secrets and imparts true wisdom only to him who seeks truth for its own sake, and who craves for knowledge in order to confer benefits on others, not on his own unimportant personality.

Lucifer, September, 1890

January 2

The springing up of evil thoughts is less injurious than that of idle and indifferent ones. Because as to evil thoughts you are always on your guard, and, having determined to fight and conquer them, this determination helps to develop the will power. Indifferent thoughts, however, serve merely to distract the attention and waste energy.

Practical Occultism, 1885

January 3

For the Occultists, who say that the author of Nature is Nature itself, something indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it follows that those who are conversant with the Occult laws of Nature, and know how to change and provoke new conditions in Ether, may —not modify the laws, but work and do the same in accordance with these immutable laws.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 1, Page 531

January 4

....learn that Occultism differs from Magic and other secret Sciences as the glorious sun does from a rushlight, as the immutable and immortal Spirit of Man — the reflection of the absolute, causeless and unknowable ALL — differs from the mortal clay — the human body.

Practical Occultism, Page 26

January 5

From the remotest periods religious philosophies taught that the whole universe was filled with divine and spiritual beings of divers races. From one of these evolved, in the course of time, ADAM, the primitive man.

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page 2

January 6

Like an immense boa-constrictor, Error, in every shape, encircles mankind, trying to smother in her deadly coils every aspiration towards truth and light. But error is powerful only on the surface, prevented as she is by Occult Nature from going any deeper.

Secret Doctrine, Volume 3, Page 23

January 7

Gnomes, sylphs, fairies, djins, etc., are the Soul of the elements, the capricious forces in Nature, acting under one immutable law, inherent in these Centres of Force, with undeveloped consciousness and bodies of plastic mould, which can be shaped according to the conscious or unconscious will of the human being who puts himself en rapport with them.

Lucifer, August, 1893

January 8

He who deprives any of his fellows of the light, the good, the help, the assistance he can wisely give them, and lives for the accumulation of material things, for his own personal gratification, is the real robber; and he who steals from his fellows the precious possession of character by slander, and any sort of misrepresentation, is no less a thief, and one of the most guilty kind.

Practical Occultism, Page 84

January 9

Civilisation has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost of the psychic and spiritual. The command over and the guidance of one's own psychic nature, which foolish men now associate with the super-natural, were with early Humanity innate and con-genital, and came to man as naturally as walking and thinking.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 2, Page 352

January 10

The Self of Matter and the Self of Spirit can never meet. One of the twin must disappear; there is no place for both.

The Voice of the Silence, Page 27

January 11

The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit — a chaos to the senses, a cosmos to the reason.

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page XXII

January 12

Try with consistent attempts to conquer the prominent weaknesses of your nature by developing thought in the direction that will kill each particular passion.

Practical Occultism, Page 86

January 13

Satan represents, metaphysically, simply the reverse or the polar opposite of everything in Nature. He is the "Adversary", allegorically, the "Murderer", and the great Enemy of all, because there is nothing in the whole Universe that has not two sides — the reverses of the same medal. But in that case, light, goodness, beauty, etc., may be called Satan with as much propriety as the Devil, since they are the Adversaries of darkness, badness and ugliness.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 2, Page 406

January 14

No sooner had the mental eye of man been opened to understanding, than the Third Race felt itself one with the ever-present, as also the ever to be unknown and invisible , ALL, the One Universal Deity. Endowed with divine powers, and feeling in himself his inner God, each felt he was a Man-God in his nature, though an animal in his physical self. The struggle between the two began from the very day they tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Wisdom; a struggle for life between the spiritual and the psychic, the psychic and the physical.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 2, Page 284

January 15

Altruism is an integral part of self-development. But we have to discriminate. A man has no right to starve himself to death that another man may have food, unless the life of that man is obviously more useful to the many than is his own life. But it is his duty to sacrifice his own comfort, and to work for others if they are unable to work for themselves...

The Key to Theosophy, Page 161

January 16

The Divine Spiritual, "I", is alone eternal, and the same throughout all births; whereas the "personalities" it informs in succession are evanescent, changing like the shadows of a kaleidoscopic series of forms in a magic lantern.

Lucifer, September, 1890

January 17

Harmony in the physical and mathematical world of sense, is justice in the spiritual one. Justice produces harmony, and injustice discord; and discord, on a cosmical scale, means chaos — annihilation

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page 330

January 18

If there is a developed immortal spirit in man, it must be in everything else, at least in a latent or germinal state, and it can only be a question of time for each of these germs to become fully developed.

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page 330

January 19

The idea of Absolute Unity would be broken entirely in our conception had we not something concrete before our eyes to contain that Unity. And the deity, being absolute, must be omnipresent, hence not an atom but contains IT within itself. The roots, the trunk and its many branches are three distinct objects, yet they are one tree.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 1, Page 89

January 20

Long persistence in a fixed determination to subjugate matter, brings about a condition in which not only is one insensible to external impressions, but even death itself may be simulated, as we have already seen. The ecstatic so enormously reinforces his will power, as to draw into himself, as into a vortex, the potencies resident in the astral light to supplement his own natural store.

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page 500

January 21

We (i.e., our personalities) become immortal by the mere fact of our thinking moral nature being grafted on our Divine Triune Monad, Atmâ-Buddhi-Manas, the three in one and one in three (aspects). For the Monad manifested on earth by the incarnating Ego is that which is called the Tree of Life Eternal, that can only be approached by eating the fruit of knowledge, the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or of Gnosis, Divine Wisdom.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 3, Page 518

January 22

Meditation, abstinence in all, the observation of moral duties, gentle thoughts, good deeds and kind words, as goodwill to all and entire oblivion of Self, are the mos efficacious means of obtaining knowledge and preparing for the reception of higher wisdom.

Practical Occultism, Page 15

January 23

Genesis....an eastern work....is in full agreement, when understood, with the universal cosmogony and evolution of life as given in the Secret Doctrine of the Archaic Ages. The last word of science is far from being uttered yet .... Esoteric philosophy teaches that man was the first living being to appear on earth, all the animal world coming after him.

Annotation, The Path, April 1888

January 24

A high development of the intellectual faculties does not imply spiritual and true life. The presence in one of a highly developed human intellectual soul...is quite compatible with the absence of Buddhi, or the spiritual soul. Unless the former evolves from and develops under the beneficent and vivifying rays of the latter, it will remain for ever, but a direct progeny of the terrestrial, lower principles, sterile in spiritual perceptions; a magnificent, luxurious sepulchre, full of the dry bones of decaying matter within.

Lucifer, October, 1893

January 25

If out of the material portion of the ether, by virtue of the inherent restlessness of its particles, the forms of worlds and their species of plants and animals can be evolved, why, out of the spiritual part of the ether, should not successive races of beings, from the stage of monad down to that of man, be developed; each lower form unfolding a higher one until the work of evolution is completed on our earth, in the production of immortal man?

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page 340

January 26

That flash of memory which is traditionally supposed to show a drowning man every long-forgotten scene of his mortal life — as the landscape is revealed to the traveller by intermittent flashes of lightning — is simply the sudden glimpse which the struggling soul gets into the silent galleries where his history is depicted in imperishable colours.

Isis Unveiled, Volume 1, Page 179

January 27

That which is to be shunned is pain not yet come. The past cannot be changed or amended; that which belongs to the experience of the present cannot and should not be shunned; but alike to be shunned are disturbing anticipations or fears of the future, and every act or impulse that may cause present or future pain to ourselves or others.

Practical Occultism, Page 87

January 28

Perfection, to be fully such, must be born out of imperfection, the incorruptible must grow out of the corruptible, having the latter as its vehicle and basis and contrast

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 2, Page 100

January 29

It is only by the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites — Spirit and Matter — can be cemented together on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity.

The Secret Doctrine , Volume 2, Page 108

January 30

Spiritualism is a philosophy (if it be one at all, which so far we deny) of but yesterday; Occultism and the philosophy of the East, whether true absolutely or relatively, are teachings coming to us from an immense antiquity.

Lucifer, June, 1896

January 31

Man, as the Archetypal Man or Adam, is made to contain the whole Kabalistic System. He is the great symbol and shadow, thrown by the manifested Kosmos, itself the reflection of the impersonal and ever-incomprehensible principle: and this shadow furnishes by its construction — the personal grown out of the impersonal — a kind of objective and tangible symbol of everything visible and invisible in the Universe.

Lucifer, May, 1892