And yet these lessons will prove fruitless. Human libraries, the monster will learn, contain for him only alien literature.

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

Hermetic quote Manguel Library alien

Consider also:

  1. “The past is the cosmopolitan’s mother country, the universal fatherland, an endless library.”
  2. “Now then learn of me the testimony of History and literature as a great Scroll of Learning. But the Vellum of the Scroll is of Man’s Skin, and its Ink of his Heart’s Blood.”
  3. “More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.”
  4. The Library at Night
  5. “The soul must voluntarily and consciously pass through a state of utter helplessness from which no earthly hand can rescue it, and in trying to raise him from which the grip of any succouring human hand will prove but a slip: until at length Divine Help itself descends from the Throne above and, with the ‘lion’s grip’ of almighty power, raises the faithful and regenerated soul to union with itself in an embrace of reconciliation and at-one-ment.”