There are elements of good and elements of evil in every man, and it depends on ourselves which class we desire to develop. From a cherry stone nothing can grow but a cherry tree, from a thistle seed nothing else than a thistle; but man is a constellation of powers in which all kinds of seeds are contained

Franz Hartmann, With the Adepts

Hermetic quote Hartmann Adepts seeds

Consider also:

  1. “Horribly useless, this business called life. What does it all matter, when love is gone? And who can hold love? Oh, misery! misery! And still so many years to live. To live alone.”
  2. “M. Chabas in his supplement to the Harris Magical Papyrus gives many instances of the good and evil uses made of the KHOU. One entered the body of a princess who was obsessed for a long period, until it was cast out by means of the health-giving Divinity. It was the KHOU which had been degraded that became a demon and the torturer of mankind.”
  3. “Good and Evil, then, if they are to find a place at all in the Universe as regarded from the Buddhist point of view, must be regarded as particular modifications of the States of Consciousness”
  4. “ASHTON: I thought… I thought we could beat anything. CUTHBERT: You thought that we could defeat the gods? ASHTON: Why not?”
  5. “Len Deighton was not an author of spy thrillers but of horror, because all Cold War–era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation to supply a frisson of terror that raises the stakes of the games their otherwise mundane characters play. And in contrast, H. P. Lovecraft was not an author of horror stories—or not entirely—for many of his preoccupations, from the obsessive collection of secret information to the infiltration and mapping of territories controlled by the alien, are at heart the obsessions of the thriller writer.”