Helena Blavatsky Quotes

Helena Blavatsky

There is no religion higher than truth.

Helena Blavatsky
(Motto of the Theosophical Society)

Occultism is the science of life, the art of living.

Helena Blavatsky

No man can swim unless he enters deep water.

Helena Blavatsky (Studies in Occultism)

The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards.

Helena Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine, 1888)

Civilization may progress, human nature will remain the same throughout all ages.

Helena Blavatsky (Warnings to would-be Occultists)

Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.

Helena Blavatsky (The Voice of the Silence, 1889)

The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute Essence. IT is best described as neither Spirit nor matter, but both

Helena Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine, 1888)

The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter I, 1877)

Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.

Helena Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine, 1888)

Life is built up by the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. Each cell in the living body must sacrifice itself to the perfection of the whole; when it is otherwise, disease and death enforce the lesson.

Helena Blavatsky

Everything lives and perishes through magnetism; one thing affects another one, even at great distances, and its "congenitals" may be influenced to health and disease by the power of this sympathy, at any time, and notwithstanding the intervening space.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter VII, 1877)

Once that a student abandons the old trodden highway of routine, and enters upon the solitary path of independent thought - Godward - he is a Theosophist, an original thinker, a seeker after the eternal truth, with 'an inspiration of his own' to solve the universal problems.

Helena Blavatsky (The Theosophist, Vol. I, No. 1, October, 1879)

Occultism is not magic, though magic is one of its tools.br> Occultism is not the acquirement of powers, whether psychic or intellectual, though both are its servants. Neither is occultism the pursuit of happiness; as men understand the word; for the first step is sacrifice, the second, renunciation.

Helena Blavatsky

But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator, on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to fetish-worship and superstition.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol II: Chapter I, 1877)

When science shall have effectually demonstrated to us the origin of matter, and proved the fallacy of the occultists and old philosophers who held (as their descendants now hold) that matter is but one of the correlations of spirit, then will the world of skeptics have a right to reject the old Wisdom, or throw the charge of obscenity in the teeth of the old religions.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter XV, 1877)

Before our globe had become egg-shaped or round it was a long trail of cosmic dust or fire-mist, moving and writhing like a serpent. This, say the explanations, was the Spirit of God moving on the chaos until its breath had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its month--emblem of eternity in its spiritual and of our world in its physical sense.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled, 1877)

Science tells us that heat may be shown to develop electricity, electricity produce heat; and magnetism to evolve electricity, and vice versa. Motion, they tell us, results from motion itself, and so on, ad infinitum. This is the A B C of occultism and of the earliest alchemists. The indestructibility of matter and force being discovered and proved, the great problem of eternity is solved.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter VII, 1877)

And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the “Lord of Phosphorus” (brimstone was a theological improvement), and Lucifer, or “Light-Bearer,” is in us: it is our Mind – our tempter and Redeemer, our intelligent liberator and Saviour from pure animalism. Without this principle – the emanation of the very essence of the pure divine principle Mahat (Intelligence), which radiates direct from the Divine mind – we would be surely no better than animals

Helena Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine, 1888)

The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist Eliphas Levi.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter XIII, 1877)

Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist the only difference between a living and a dead body is, that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent. When it is extinct or entirely latent, the molecules obey a superior attraction, which draws them asunder and scatters them through space. This dispersion must be death, if it is possible to conceive such a thing as death where the very molecules of the dead body manifest an intense vital energy.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol II: Chapter I, 1877)

The infinite and uncreated spirit that we usually call GOD, a substance of the highest virtue and excellency, produced everything else by emanative causality. God thus is the primary substance, the rest, the secondary; if the former created matter with a power of moving itself, he, the primary substance, is still the cause of that motion as well as of the matter, and yet we rightly say that it is matter which moves itself. "We may define this kind of spirit we speak of to be a substance indiscernible, that can move itself, that can penetrate, contract, and dilate itself, and can also penetrate, move, and alter matter," which is the third emanation.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter VII, 1877)

it has been decreed, from time immemorial, that each one must be his own sufficient pilot and body-guard so far as visible things are concerned.

The 'Kingdom of Heaven,' which I need not tell you is but the dominion of man's immortal spirit over the inner force of the Universe, must be taken by violence.

I am sorry to be compelled to tell you, that the prize of Wisdom and Power must be won through danger, trial, temptation, the allurements of sense and all the besetments of this world of matter which they counterpoise, hence antagonists of spirit. Broad, smooth and flower-sprinkled is the way to the world's rewards; narrow, hard, sorrow beset the path to the Temple of Truth.

Helena Blavatsky (Letter to Thomas H. Evans, 1885)

While Moses forbids 'graven images' of Him whose name is not to be taken in vain, Spinoza goes farther. He clearly infers that God must not be so much as described. Human language is totally unfit to give an idea of this "Being" who is altogether unique. Whether it is Spinoza or the Christian theology that is more right in their premises and conclusion, we leave the reader to judge for himself. Every attempt to the contrary leads a nation to anthropomorphize the deity in whom it believes, and the result is that given by Swedenborg. Instead of stating that God made man after his own image, we ought in truth to say that "man imagines God after his image," forgetting that he has set up his own reflection for worship.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter IX, 1877)

What is the real object of modern education? Is it to cultivate and develop the mind in the right direction; to teach the disinherited and hapless people to carry with fortitude the burden of life (allotted them by Karma); to strengthen their will; to inculcate in them the love of one's neighbour and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood; and thus to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it. And yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education. No one denies it; all your educationalists admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject. But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy, nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer: "The object of modern education is to pass examinations," a system not to develop right emulation, but to generate and breed jealousy, envy, hatred almost, in young people for one another, and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honours and emoluments instead of kindly feeling.

Helena Blavatsky

The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable — hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine essence, from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and "darkness," solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the "deep." To use a metaphor which will convey the idea still more clearly, an outbreathing of the "unknown essence" produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series which had no beginning and will have no end.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol II: Chapter VI, 1877)

Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law — this was and is the basis of magic.

Helena Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled - Vol I: Chapter VII, 1877)

Relevant Pages

Western Esotericism



Helena Blavatsky Biography

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky portrait

Born: 1831
Died: 1891

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a Russian occultist, spirit medium and author. She is best known for being one of the co-founders of the Theosophical Society in 1875, which propagated the spiritual and esoteric path of Theosophy.

Notable Works

Isis Unveiled (1877)
The Secret Doctrine (1888)
The Voice of the Silence (1889)