Welsh People

"That I should profess magic in this discourse and justify the professors of it withal is impiety with many but religion, with me. It is a conscience that I have learned from authors greater than myself and scriptures greater than both."

"Magic is nothing but the wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the creature. It is a name — as Agrippa saith — "not distasteful to the very Gospel itself.""

"Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged Him in the flesh before that He Himself discovered it. I find God conversant with them, as He was formerly with the patriarchs. He directs them in their travels with a star, as He did the Israelites with a pillar of fire. He informs them of future dangers in their dreams (129)"

"To reconcile this science and the Masters of it to the world is an attempt more plausible than possible, the prejudice being so great that neither reason nor authority can balance it."

"I have, Reader — and, I suppose, it is not unknown to thee — within these few years, in several little treatises, delivered my judgment of philosophy. I say, of philosophy, for alchemy — in the common acceptation, and as it is a torture of metals — I did never believe: much less did I study it."

"As I ever disclaimed alchemy in the vulgar sense, so I thought fit to let the alchemists know it, lest — in the perusal of my writings — they should fix a construction to some passages which cannot suit with the judgment of their author."

"Hence thou mayst see what my conceptions were, when I began to write; and now I must tell thee, they are still the same, nor hath my long experience weakened them at all, but invincibly confirmed them."

"It was well that I quitted it at last and walked again into that clear light which I had foolishly forsaken."

"The Rosicrucians strove to combine together the most various branches of Occultism, and they soon became renowned for the extreme purity of their lives and their extraordinary powers, as well as for their thorough knowledge... Later... they gave birth to the more modem Theosophists, at whose head was Paracelsus, and to the Alchemists, one of the most celebrated of whom was Thomas Vaughan (seventeenth century), who wrote the most practical things on Occultism under the name of Eugenius Philalethes. I know and can prove that Vaughan was, most positively, "made before he became." p. 43"

"The words “never” and “impossible” ought to be erased from the dictionary of humanity, until the time at least when the great Cabala shall all be solved, and so rejected or accepted. The “Count St. Germain” is, until this very time, a living mystery; and the Rosicrucian Thomas Vaughan another one. p. 45"

"Philalethes, Eugenius. The Rosicrucian name assumed by one Thomas Vaughan, a mediæval English Occultist and Fire Philosopher. He was a great Alchemist."

"Pythagoras and Plato and Boehme and Paracelsus and Thomas Vaughan were men who bore their lamps amidst their fellowmen in life under a hail of nonunderstanding and abuse. Anyone could approach them, but only a few were able to discern the superearthly radiance behind the earthly face. It is possible to name great Servitors of East and West, North and South. It is possible to peruse their biographies; yet everywhere we feel that the superearthly radiance appears rarely in the course of centuries. One should learn from reality. (175)"

"But thou, admired Eugenius, whose great arts Shine above envy and the common arts ... Shake off the eclipse, this dark, intruding veil Which would force night upon us and entail The same gross ignorance — in whose shades he Hath lost himself — on our posterity. Down, all you stale impostures, castles rear'd In th' air and guarded by thy reverend beard, Brat of Nichomachus. I will no more Bow to thy hoary handful nor adore Thy tyrant text; but by this dawning light, Which streams upon me through thy three-piled night, Pass to the East of truth, till I may see Man's first fair state, when sage simplicity, The dove and serpent, innocent and wise, Dwelt in his breast and he in Paradise. There from the Tree of Knowledge his best boughs I'll pluck a garland for Eugenius' brows, Which to succeeding times fame shall bequeathe, With this most just applause — Great Vaughan's wreath."

"He is said to have been buried on March 1 in the church of Albury village by the care and charge of the said Sir Robert Murray... But the letter of Henry Vaughan to John Aubrey says only that his brother died "upon an employment for His Majesty.""

"Audi Ignis Vocem."

"The Author to the reader:"

"Look on this life as the Progress of an Essence Royale. The Soul but quits her court to see the country. Heaven hath in it a scene of earth; and had she had bin contented with ideas, she had not travelled beyond the map."

"Ignorance gave this release the name of death, but properly it is the soul's birth and a charter that makes for her liberty."

"She hath several ways to break up house, but her best is without a disease. This is her mystical walk, an exit only to return."

"It is an age of intellectual slaveries; If they meet any thing extraordinary, they prune it with distinctions, or daub it with false glosses, til it looks like the traditions of Aristotle. His followers are so confident of his principles they seek not to understand what others speak, but to make others speak what they understand."

"Now if I should question any sect (for there is no Communion in Christendom) whither these later intimations drive? They can but return me to the first rudiments, or produce some empty pretense of Spirit."

"Friar Bacon walked in Oxford between two steeples, but he that would have discovered his thoughts, by his steps, had been more his fool than his fellow."

"The peripateticks when they define the soul or some inferior principle describe it only by outward circumstances, which every child can do, but they state nothing essentially."

"Where was Michael Collins during the Great War? He would have been worth a dozen brass hats."

"Diary with Letters by Thomas Jones (1954), formerly assistant secretary to the cabinet, is incomparably the best source for the appeasers."

"He is the liberal conscience of the party."

"I am a Tory P.M., surrounded with a Tory Cabinet, moving in Tory circles. You don't let me forget or ignore the whole range of ideas that normally I should never be brought up against if you were not in and out of this room. You supply the radium... you have such an extraordinary width of friendships in all classes, and so many interests that through you I do gather impressions of what is being thought by a number of significant people whose minds I should not know, at any rate so well, but for your help. I think every Tory P.M. ought to have someone like you about the place."

"Politically I was an "inevitable gradualist", basically rather to the left of the Prime Ministers, but with a faith free from any dogmatic finality or Utopian perfection. I had no credal difficulty in serving each Minister in turn; we were all infected with Liberalism. I had all the influence I could wield; the only limit was my own inadequacy. By tradition I was a Welsh radical nonconformist, by temperament I was a civil servant, law-abiding, a believer in ordered progress. I believed a little in each of the three Parties, more in the Left than in the Right—"a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley"."

"Elvis was always over the top. It's funny that in those days people who wanted to look like Elvis would wear leather jackets and jeans, because that's what he wore in his movies. In real life, Elvis never wore denim. He thought they were work clothes. When he had to wear them, when he was driving a truck, he would do but he always loved the way black entertainers dressed. He styled himself on them, because he wanted to be flamboyant. That's why he had that gold lamé suit! He designed his jumpsuits himself. He always said, "If you're going to be a star, you should look like one.""

"Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent would be my five."

"When I was younger I got into fights with my brother. Now I’m older, I can’t get into any bother... now if I explode, I’m the one who’s going to die. I’m an old man."