Stephan A. Hoeller Quotes

#1. Gnostic teachings speak of the reality and power of evil and its fundamental presence throughout manifest existence. They declare that while we may not be able to rid the world or ourselves of evil, we may, and indeed will, rise above it through gnosis.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#2. Historically and geographically speaking, Gnosticism developed at the same time and in the same places as early Christianity, with which it was, and remained, entwined - Palestine, Syria, Samaria, and Anatolia, and later, Ptolemaic Egypt.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#3. A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#4. Human beings are not on earth to be citizens, or taxpayers, or socially engineered pawns of other human beings; rather they are here in order to grow, to transform, to become their authentic selves.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#5. Gnosticism has always been difficult to define, largely because it is a system of thought based upon and frequently amended by experiences of nonordinary states of consciousness, and thus it is resistant to theological rigidity.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#6. According to Gnostic teaching, the world is a mixture of the seeds of light and of darkness. Though it is impossible to distinguish between them now, in the fullness of time they will separate naturally, as ordained.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#7. Man sows good wheat seed in his field, but later finds that an enemy has sown weeds among the wheat. When the workers ask if they should pull the weeds out, the farmer tells them to allow both wheat and weeds to grow until the time of the harvest, when the two can be more easily separated.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#8. When desire is killed out by a variety of methods of meditation and contemplation, what remains is a psychic corpse from which the libidinal cosmic force of the vital surge has been artificially removed.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#9. All of us are in desperate need of the restoration of our wholeness through union with our inmost self.

Stephan A. Hoeller

#10. Long as a person will not raise his or her consciousness beyond the physical world to higher, spiritual realities, the soul's enslavement in darkness - whether darkness in the outer, physical world or in

Stephan A. Hoeller

#11. Implications of gnosis: What makes us free is the gnosis of who we were of what we have become of where we were of wherein we have been cast of whereto we are hastening of what we are being freed of what birth really is of what rebirth really is. (Excerpta de Theodoto)

Stephan A. Hoeller