Top 40 Dion Fortune Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We take spiritual initiation when we become conscious of the Divine within us, and thereby contact the Divine without us.”

— Dion Fortune

2. “Magick is the art of causing changes in consciousness to occur in accordance with the will.”

— Dion Fortune

3. “What you contemplate, you touch. What you enter into in imagination, you make yourself one with.”

— Dion Fortune

4. “All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one Initiator.”

— Dion Fortune

5. “Symbols are to the mind what tools are to the hand – an extended application of its powers.”

— Dion Fortune

6. “A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and if one of the team cannot handle the forces, everybody is going to suffer. A ritual lodge is no place for the well-meaning ineffectual.”

— Dion Fortune

7. “Do you believe in an invisible reality behind appearances?”

— Dion Fortune

8. “When we speak of the Path we mean much more than a course of study. The Path is a way of life and on it the whole being must co-operate if the heights are to be won.”

— Dion Fortune

9. “The body is the vehicle of the mind.”

— Dion Fortune

10. “We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them.”

— Dion Fortune

11. “The true nature of the gods is that of magical images shaped out of the astral plane by mankind’s thought, and influenced by the mind.”

— Dion Fortune

12. “It is one of the strictest conditions of initiation that occult knowledge may never be sold or used for gain.”

— Dion Fortune

13. “Superstition has been defined as the use of a form whose significance has been forgotten.”

— Dion Fortune

14. “The descent into matter must be complete before the ascent to spirit can commence.”

— Dion Fortune

15. “Esoteric science premises the existence of the Great Unmanifest, which may be conceived as a sea of limitless but latent force which underlies all things and whence all things derive their substance and draw their life.”

— Dion Fortune

16. “There is a life behind the personality that uses personalities as masks. There are times when life puts off the mask and deep answers unto deep.”

— Dion Fortune

17. “Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind.”

— Dion Fortune

18. “A religion without a goddess is halfway to atheism.”

— Dion Fortune

19. “The spirit of religious persecution is not the special failing of any particular faith, but springs eternal in the human breast.”

— Dion Fortune

20. “In sympathetic magic one imitated a thing and so got into touch with it.”

— Dion Fortune

21. “I well remember it being said to me by an occultist of great experience that two things are necessary for safety in occultism, right motives and right associates.”

— Dion Fortune

22. “One cannot blame an organization that picks up an occasional black sheep, one only takes exception if it retains an accumulation of them.”

— Dion Fortune

23. “True spirituality never advertises itself.”

— Dion Fortune

24. “The Scorpion connects with the Serpent through the Dragon.”

— Dion Fortune

25. “In brief, the Tree of Life is a compendium of science, psychology, philosophy and theology.”

— Dion Fortune

26. “The initiate, however, uses a symbol-system differently; he uses it as an algebra by means of which he will read the secrets of unknown potencies; in other words, he uses the symbol as a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible.”

— Dion Fortune

27. “There is something very intimate and personal about one’s books. They reveal so much of one’s private soul.”

— Dion Fortune

28. “The occultist does not try to dominate Nature, but to bring himself into harmony with these great Cosmic Forces, and work with them.”

— Dion Fortune

29. “If we wish to understand the modus operandi of the spiritual forces, we must distinguish between the spiritual and the mental.”

— Dion Fortune

30. “After all, the human machine is an internal combustion engine running on spirit.”

— Dion Fortune

31. “I can best compare my life to a vitaminless diet – plenty of nutritive bulk, but the little something that meant health was lacking. I suppose my trouble was really spiritual scurvy.”

— Dion Fortune

32. “I saw the sea-gods come, moving with an irresistible momentum, not rising into the air as the riders rose, but deep in their own element, unhasting, unresting; for the power of the sea is in the weight of the waters and not in the wind-blown crests. These Great Ones rose with the tide, and like the tide, nothing might withstand them.”

— Dion Fortune

33. “In his imagination he performed the ‘composition of place’ reconstructing the scene from what he could remember of the classics, so laboriously and unprofitably rammed into his head at Harrow.”

— Dion Fortune

34. “No enunciation of the Truth will ever be complete, no method of training will ever be suitable for all temperaments, no one can do more than mark out the little plot of infinity which he intends to cultivate, and thrust in the spade, trusting that the soil may eventually be fruitful and free from weeds so far as the bounds he has set himself extend...”

— Dion Fortune

35. “You want to wake the Old Gods, don’t you?” “Yes.” “Well then, go where the Old Gods are accustomed to be worshipped.”

— Dion Fortune

36. “When it comes to the question of the mummy’s curse, I am afraid that my sympathies are entirely with the mummy.”

— Dion Fortune

37. “It has been well and truly said that in the exoteric church the ceremony is performed by one person for the benefit of the congregation; but in the Lodge the ceremony is performed by the congregation for the benefit of one person.”

— Dion Fortune

38. “Occultism has no Pope.”

— Dion Fortune

39. “He had a sudden twinge of conscience concerning his responsibilities at the seaside villa, but dismissed it as quixotic. What he was doing was harming no one, and the blessing and peace of it all was so great a boon. He had tried cutting it off drastically once, and the result had been an explosion of emotion he had no mind to precipitate again. What earthly need was there to give up his dream-woman who harmed nobody and helped him so tremendously?”

— Dion Fortune

40. “Phantasms of the Living,” by Gurney and Podmore.”

— Dion Fortune

41. “We all know that, when caught off our guard, there comes a dark temptation from the depths of our lower selves, something atavistic stirs, and we think thoughts, or even do deeds, of which we would never have believed ourselves capable.”

— Dion Fortune

42. “This life looked like being a wash-out, so I pinned my hopes to the next.”

— Dion Fortune

43. “Life is not quite so simple as the uninformed would like to believe.”

— Dion Fortune

44. “God be thanked, the meanest of His mortals, Has two soul-sides, one to face the world with; One to show a woman when he loves her.”

— Dion Fortune