Best 5 quotes of Joscelyn Godwin on MyQuotes

In most musical instruments the resonator is made of wood while the actual sound generator is of animal origin. In cultures where music is still used as a magical force, the making of an instrument always involves the sacrifice of a living being. That being's soul then becomes part of the instrument and in the tones that come forth, the 'singing dead,' who are ever present with us, make themselves heard.

The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.

The usual struggle squeezing my bloated Citroën, absurdly named “Picasso,” in or out of any old Italian town. I should be taking a year over this and doing it on a donkey. Eventually found the road to the church of the Madonna of San Biagio, a foursquare temple sitting all alone in the plain. Sangallo's fantasy of the Doric order in honey-colored sandstone, with shell-niches, rosettes, oculi under heavy entablatures. Any one ignorant of geometry scarcely dare enter this shrine to number, measure, and weight. So clean and crisp I could eat it for breakfast.

...it was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Léon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters.

The second part of the motto of the left-hand path, “Love is the law׳, love under will,” became for the Nazis: “Hatred is the law, hatred under will”—a powerful formula indeed. The inescapable historical parallel to all of this is to be seen in the innumerable cruelties committed by Christians against Jews, pagans, witches, heretics, and each other: a disgrace to the Solar tradition, as the Nazis are to the Polar. Yet many of the worst offenders were pious, and believed themselves to be sincere Christians; some of them were even "mystics". All this goes to show that any religious tradition can do more harm than good, unless it is tempered by the simple humanity and compassion that come more readily to women than to men. When the Dalai Lama says with his characteristic smile, “My religion is Kindness,” he is pointing the way to the Golden Age more surely than any priest, shaykh, or esoteric pundit.