Rene Guenon Quotes

#1. We have in fact entered upon the final phase ... , the darkest period of this dark age, the state of dissolution from which there is to be no emerging except through a cataclysm, since it is no longer a mere revival which is required, but a complete renovation.

Rene Guenon

#2. It is also said that Genghis Khan wanted to attack the kingdom of Prester John, but that the latter repulsed him by unleashing thunderbolts against his armies.

Rene Guenon

#3. True ideas do not change or develop, but remain as they are in the timeless 'present.

Rene Guenon

#4. [Modern scientific] theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory.

Rene Guenon

#5. It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!

Rene Guenon

#6. So long as western people imagine that there only exists a single type of humanity, that there is only one 'civilization', at different stages of development, no mutual understanding will be possible.

Rene Guenon

#7. The profane sciences of which the modern world is so proud are really and truly only the degenerate 'residues' of the ancient traditional sciences.

Rene Guenon

#8. What men call chance is simply their ignorance of causes; if the statement that something had happened by chance were to mean that it had no cause, it would be a contradiction in terms.

Rene Guenon

#9. The "end of a world" never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion

Rene Guenon

#10. Indeed the study of the Easy as we know it today, if undertaken in a really direct way, would be of great assistance towards the understanding of all Antiquity, on account of that very quality of fixity and stability.

Rene Guenon

#11. It is almost as if the Greeks, at a time when they were about to disappear from history, wished to avenge themselves for their own incomprehension by imposing on a whole section of mankind the limitations of their own mental horizons.

Rene Guenon