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“If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.

[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772]”
― ben franklin, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Franklin

“Nothing is ever lost as time passes, it merely metamorphoses into something as wonderful or, in some cases, into something even better than before.”
― Carole Carlton, Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year

“That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you become common. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“We sang, we danced, we talked, we laughed, we ate, we drank, but most of all we shared our contributions and I learned, that Lughnasadh night, that true gifts come from the heart and not necessarily from the purse.”
― Carole Carlton, Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year

“If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.”
― John G. Jackson, Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

“Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Mrs Darley, I noticed, always had her corn dolly amidst an arrangement of cornflowers and poppies (albeit they were artificial!). The corn, I was to later understand, represented the God, the red poppies his sacrificial blood and the blue cornflowers his death and this is something I still adhere to today.”
― Carole Carlton, Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year

“The blue of winter, the brown of spring, the red of summer, and the fall of green. I seek the place of treasures past. I seek the truth of sand and glass. I call to the wind of seasons past. I bring with me the best of summer. I am the one with whom you bask. Deliver me and complete your task.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Awakened

“No desolation equal to that of the pagan, suddenly bereft. For to the pagan, there is no hereafter.”
― Cornell Woolrich, Waltz into Darkness

“Those who seek out the comfort of trees are usually on a journey for meaning, wisdom.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, The Magic of Nature: Meditations & Spells to Find Your Inner Voice

“Making corn dollies under the watchful eye of Mrs Darley was an absolute must for all of us living in the tiny Cornish hamlet on Bodmin Moor.”
― Carole Carlton, Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year

“I'm not a man so I do not have a heart that loves as a human does. I'm an immortal god that dwells with supreme power because I hold the keys to Death. But you are my existence. I am yours.”
― Abbi Glines, Existence

“We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. We see more things than the ancients and things more distant, but it is due neither to the sharpness of our sight nor the greatness of out stature. It is simply because they have lent us their own.”
― St Bernard of Clairveaux

“When Abbess Ebba received tidings of the near approach of the pagan hordes, who had already wrecked vengeance upon ecclesiastics, monks, and consecrated virgins, she summoned her nuns to Chapter, and in a moving discourse exhorted them to preserve at any cost the treasure of their chastity. Then seizing a razor, and calling upon her daughters to follow her heroic example, she mutilated her face in order to inspire the barbarian invaders with horror at the sight. The nuns without exception courageously followed the example of their abbess. When the Danes broke into the cloister and saw the nuns with faces thus disfigured, they fled in panic. Their leaders, burning with rage, sent back some of their number to set fire to the monastery, and thus the heroic martyrs perished in the common ruin of their house.”
― Michael Barrett, A Calendar of Scottish Saints

“I eyed the sheriff. “So I better be breathing when He finds me.â€� “Who the hell are you talking about?â€� the sheriff blurted.
I chuckled.
The postman sneered at the sheriff. “She means the Demon King. The Devil. This is a phone from Hell—the real one.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“With his nose in my hair, he inhaled deeply before putting a light kiss on my cheek. “Have you come to play?â€� he asked then kissed me again.
“No.� I cringed when he drew my earlobe into his mouth. “I came to help you. That’s all. I swear.�
“I’d rather play.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“I flinched when his hands lifted, although it was more of a reaction to everything that had been happening to me, not necessarily because he was Death. He stilled. “You’re sad,â€� he said. “Let me help you.â€�
“There isn’t anything you can do.�
“I can comfort you.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“What exactly did you expect me to do? I told The Boss what you said, but he’s not going to budge. Nobody gets dental.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“I’d like to say it could have been worse. I’m sure lots of people hate their job, or their boss, or the people they work with. I just couldn’t relate to those people. They have options. They can quit their job, move out of town, or drop off the grid. The only option I had was a guaranteed one-way ticket to Hell when I died, and that didn’t include dental.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“You came here of your own free will, Claire. I won’t be denied. You’re mine now, and I intend to keep you.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“I grouped my fellow employees into three categories: the plebes, the damned, and the demons.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Hope

“I must complete my quest or I will die.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Awakened

“I pulled Thanos in for a kiss, surprising him. I wasn’t sure if it was our bond or the fear this might be my last kiss, but I didn’t hold anything back. I let him in. He took full advantage, plundering my mouth as if I were the last woman on Earth, which could have been a result of him being trapped in a desolate wasteland for the last five hundred years—but I decided not to overthink it.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Awakened

“She shoved me against the wall, pulling a knife from her belt and pressing it against my throat. “Who are you?â€� she hissed.
I winced as the blade drew a line of blood on my flesh. I considered my options. Queen of the Fallen, no. Enemy to your children, no. “I’m Claire, the Devil’s assistant,â€� I answered, deciding on the simplest choice.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Awakened

“I couldn’t just start killing people. That wasn’t really my thing.”
― H.D. Smith, Dark Forsaken

“They were nothing more than modern day pagan worshippers. Congregants of a religion built on greed and hedonism. The trading floor served as their shrine; the phones as their Holy Grail; and the clients as the prophets who would entitle them to choose between putting the next down payment on a Lamborghini or a Mercedes”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, The Rise of Shams

“Above all, we new pagans must learn to know and honor the Many as they manifest in our own time and place. While the ways of the ancestors—the Received Tradition—must always inform our thought and action, we are truest to our heritage when we think and act as natives of here and now. Our mandate is to be the pagans for our own time, our own place, our own post-modern, science-driven Western culture. This is the only kind of pagan that we can honestly be; anything else is pretense." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“Whereas the pagans of yore groped after mystery in all the strange beauty of the world, the pagans of the 20th century, having supplanted nature with factories, saw the glimmer of the transcendental only in themselves. Hence, their longing for mystery—union in one sacred body, absolute order, and submission to an omnipotent lord—was manifested in an obscene eidolon palpable, for instance, in the Nazi motto, 'ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.”
― Michael Shindler

“In Dante’s Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil visited the Castle of Limbo, in the center of which was an idyllic green meadow. This was where the great pagan souls, the virtuous pagans, spent eternity. Limbo was a place of calm contemplation and tranquility. Its denizens were not tormented and tortured but left to their own devices. They could converse with one another among green fields and scenic towers. The most illustrious of them radiated an inner light, reflecting their genius. Even the Abrahamic God was dazzled by the enlightened pagans, the great heroes of philosophy, art, poetry, science and mathematics. No one can quench their light, and no one can remove their joy.”
― Thomas Stark, Castalia: The Citadel of Reason