Disappointed both in love and in friendship, and looking upon human learning as vanity, he had come to a conclusion that there was but one good thing in the world, videlicet, a good dinner

Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

Hermetic quote Peacock Abbey dinner

Consider also:

  1. “It may seem egocentric, but Martin wasn’t worried about that. He had spent a lot of time thinking about himself, and had come to the conclusion that he was definitely not self-absorbed.”
  2. “I drew my own conclusion, which was that there is an entire category of experience that is not suited to intraspecies communication, so you are advised to keep it to yourself.”
  3. “As the admission of every candidate into a Lodge presupposes his prior existence in the world without the Lodge, so our doctrine presupposes that ever soul born into this world has lived in, and has come hither from, an anterior state of life. It has lives elsewhere before it entered this world: it will live elsewhere when it passes hence, human life being but a parenthesis in the midst of eternity.”
  4. “If an Englishman of a generation or two ago could have been shown a little black box and told that if he turned a knob the President of the United States would talk to him, he would have laughed at the idea. If one could have convinced him that the voice was actually that of the President that Englishman would have been forced to the conclusion that the black box was magical. And yet we know now that the feat is quite possible, and that the box is only that kind of magic now revealed to the profane as ‘radio.'”
  5. “But upon entering this world, the soul must needs assume material form; in other words it takes upon itself a physical body to enable it to enter into relations with the physical world, and to perform the functions appropriate to it in this particular phase of its career. Need I say that the physical form with which we have all been invested by the Creator upon our entrance into this world, and of which we shall all divest ourselves when we leave the Lodge of this life, is represented among us by our Masonic apron?”