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Frithjof Schuon Quotes
1907–1998 Switzerland
Frithjof Schuon (Switzerland, 18 June 1907 – U.S.A., 5 May 1998) was a Swiss metaphysician and spiritual master of German descent, belonging to the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, the religious phenomenon, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages.
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The chief difficulty of the spiritual life is to maintain a simple, qualitative, heavenly position in a complex, quantitative, earthly setting.
It could be said that faith is that something which makes intellectual certitude become holiness; or which is the realizatory power of certitude.
There is no access to the Heart without the virtues.
When God is absent, pride fills the void.
Truth and Holiness: all values are in these two terms; all that we must love and all that we must be.
Objective intelligence, free will, virtuous soul: these are the three prerogatives that constitute man.
Only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative.
Truth is the raison d’être for man’s existence; it constitutes our grandeur and reveals to us our smallness.
Humanly, no one escapes the obligation to "believe in order to be able to understand" (credo ut intelligam).
The sacred introduces a quality of the absolute into relativities and confers on perishable things a texture of eternity.
The beautiful is not that which we love and because we love it, but that which by its objective value obliges us to love it.
One cannot love God without fearing him, any more than one can love one's neighbor without respecting him; not to fear God is to prevent Him showing mercy.
Wisdom consists not only in knowing truths and being able to communicate them, but also in the sage’s capacity to recognize the most subtle limitations or hazards of human nature.
Sanctity is essentially contemplativity: it is the intuition of the spiritual nature of things; profound intuition which determines the entire soul, hence the entire being of man.
Reason perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whereas Intellect perceives the principial − the metaphysical − and proceeds by intuition.
Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, belongs fundamentally to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being.
To accept a trial is to thank God for it, with the understanding that it permits us a victory, a detachment with regard to the world and with regard to the ego.
The language of Sophia perennis is above all symbolism in all its forms, thus the openness to the message of symbols is a gift proper to primordial man and his heirs in every age.
Faith is to say "yes" to God. When man says "yes" to God, God says "yes" to man.
It is easy to criticize the "fanaticism" of our ancestors when one has lost the very notion of saving truth, or to be "tolerant" when one derides religion.
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