Albert Pike

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than aught else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men and nations can descend.

Reverence for greatness dies out, and is succeeded by base envy of greatness.

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means of …

We avoid sensuousness, only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter. Spirit is — spirit.

thus religion and philosophy became to a great extent disputes as to the meaning of words.

Out of these explanations grew by degrees a variety of narrations, whose true object and meaning were gradually forgotten, or lost in contradictions and incongruities.

To present a visible symbol to the eye of another, is not necessarily to inform him of the meaning which that symbol has to you.

All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action.

All religious expression is symbolism

We do not see and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly from the level or the waving land as from the elevation of a lone peak, towering above the plain; for each looks through his own mist.

It is, civilly, all aptitudes having equal opportunity; politically, all votes having equal weight; religiously, all consciences having equal rights.

The common right is nothing more or less than the protection of all, pouring its rays on each. This protection of each by all, is Fraternity.

But in this association there is no abdication.

From the political point of view there is but a single principle,— the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty.

The unconsidered act of the poorest of men may fire the train that leads to the subterranean mine, and an empire be rent by the explosion.

The word well spoken, the deed fitly done, even by the feeblest or humblest, cannot help but have their effect. More or less, the effect is inevitable and eternal.

Remember, that though life is short, Thought and the influences of what we do or say, are immortal; and that no calculus has yet pretended to ascertain the law of proportion between cause and effect.

Phenomena are constantly folded back upon themselves.

Let no Fellow-Craft imagine that the work of the lowly and uninfluential is not worth the doing.

The rest that follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.

The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce, the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male.

The Sun is the ancient symbol of the life-giving and generative power of the Deity.

The obligation of the candidate is always to be taken on the sacred book or books of his religion, that he may deem it more solemn and binding; and therefore it was that you were asked of what religion you were. We have no other concern …

Man is not to be comprehended as a starting-point, or progress as a goal, without those two great forces, Faith and Love. Prayer is sublime.