Charlatan Quotes

“We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.”
― Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror

“The hoodlum-occultist is “sociopathic” enough to, see through the conventional charade, the social mythology of his species. “They’re all sheep,” he thinks. “Marks. Suckers. Waiting to be fleeced.” He has enough contact with some more-or-less genuine occult tradition to know a few of the gimmicks by which “social consciousness,” normally conditioned consciousness, can be suspended. He is thus able to utilize mental brutality in place of the simple physical brutality of the ordinary hooligan.

He is quite powerless against those who realize that he is actually a stupid liar.

He is stupid because spending your life terrorizing and exploiting your inferiors is a dumb and boring existence for anyone with more than five billion brain cells. Can you imagine Beethoven ignoring the heavenly choirs his right lobe could hear just to pound on the wall and annoy the neighbors? Gödel pushing aside his sublime mathematics to go out and cheat at cards? Van Gogh deserting his easel to scrawl nasty caricatures in the men’s toilet? Mental evil is always the stupidest evil because the mind itself is not a weapon but a potential paradise.

Every kind of malice is a stupidity, but occult malice is stupidest of all. To the extent that the mindwarper is not 100 percent charlatan through-and-through (and most of them are), to the extent that he has picked up some real occult lore somewhere, his use of it for malicious purposes is like using Shakespeare’s sonnets for toilet tissue or picking up a Picasso miniature to drive nails. Everybody who has advanced beyond the barbarian stage of evolution can see how pre-human such acts are, except the person doing them.

Genuine occult initiation confers “the philosopher’s stone,” “the gold of the wise” and “the elixir of life,” all of which are metaphors for the capacity to greet life with the bravery and love and gusto that it deserves. By throwing this away to indulge in spite, malice and the small pleasure of bullying the credulous, the mindwarper proves himself a fool and a dolt.

And the psychic terrorist, besides being a jerk, is always a liar and a fraud. Healing is easier (and more fun) than cursing, to begin with, and cursing usually backfires or misfires. The mindwarper doesn’t want you to know that. He wants you to think he’s omnipotent.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“Some friends are like sunny days, with false flames, oozing from afar, coming near without a dime.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“There are rumors that you died on the Fold. People have been selling off parts of you all over Ravka and West Ravka for months. You’re quite the good luck charm.”
“Those are supposed to be my fingers?”
“Knuckles, toes, fragments of rib.”
I felt sick. I looked around, hoping to spot Mal, needing to see something familiar.
“Of course,” Nikolai continued, “if half of those were really your toes, you’d have about a hundred feet. But superstition is a powerful thing.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“Unsettling are the days in which everyone is an expert.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“A silver-tongued charlatan and a half-wit society are made for each other! When these two come together in an election, a great disaster happens: Charlatan comes to power!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“He denounced him openly as a charlatan--a fraud with no valuable knowledge of any kind, or powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being.”
― Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

“A charlatan walked as a prophet,
and changed the world of sheep in his wake,
and all that while,
God watched
with blind eyes,
helpless…”
― Vijay Fafat, The Ninth Pawn of White - A Book of Unwritten Verses

“An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The charlatan is always the pioneer... The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Tales of Terror and Mystery

“It is a harsh reality that some of the most important and respectable jobs which deserve high salaries might be better off with low salaries. A politician, or a minister, or a teacher is sure to be working sincerely and selflessly for the good of the people when through and through there is little monetary reward guaranteed. This is how the charlatans are weeded out of the field.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“One cannot become a pundit by proxy.”
― Vijay Fafat, The Ninth Pawn of White - A Book of Unwritten Verses

“To act wise isn’t to act wisely.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“He saw himself as a hated prier into the homes of strangers, a kind of intellectual charlatan rationalizing his own prurience into scientific curiosity; someone at once lower and more pretentious than a professional social worker.”
― Harry Sylvester, Dayspring

“Throughout the human history millions have died because of the kings and the queens, because of the presidents and the prime ministers, because of the Caesars and the duces, because of all these little charlatans with big ego!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Un charlatán, con lengua de plata, y una sociedad medio ingeniosa están hechos el uno para el otro! Cuando los dos se juntan en una elección, ocurre un gran desastre: ¡El charlatán llega al poder!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“There was a time when love filled his heart, but no more. Once Sam had sought enlightenment and thought he'd found its path on an Ashram outside Los Angeles. Once Sam had a teacher in whom he believed without reservation, who had helped him discover the inner resonances of the divine within himself. Sam had read that one could become a completely God-realized being and was awed and inspired by this perfection he saw in his teacher. As Sam progressed, his guru became more than his teacher, he became his beloved friend. Sam grew in stature and recognition in the community of spiritual seekers gathered about the guru. Sam's utter admiration made the truth more painful still when he discovered that advancement within the order was not by merit alone but that several of the higher ranking members had been conferred their status in exchange for sexual favors and that the donations made to the center went first and foremost toward the material enrichment of the leader. Life for Sam then lost its reason. He had no faith in any human being not even himself. He certainly had no faith left for the merciful and benevolent God that allowed his loving devotee to fall into the hands of such a charlatan. Sam was deeply disillusioned and heartbroken. He walked out of the center that day with no possessions, no money, no beliefs. His great spiritual quest had brought him here to New York, a homeless man living in a makeshift shanty under the overpass of the Long Island Expressway. Sam was numb inside. He did not think about his guru; he could not bear to think about the guru. Therefore, he hid his great pain deep inside himself.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“There is not such a thing as a 'know it all' as human knowledge is immense and human lifespan pathetically short.”
― Et Imperatrix Noctem

“El atractivo místico de la nueva física ha cautivado a mucha gente de mente religiosa o filosófica que ve en los recientes descubrimientos una liberación del mundo materialista e impersonal producto de la moderna sociedad tecnológica.”
― Paul Davies, Superforce

“Die Beeinflussung der Massen ist [...] keine Schwarzkunst, gegen die an die weisse Magie der Eliten zu appellieren wäre. Sie ist eine geschichtliche Aufgabe, und vieles [...] spricht dafür, dass der Charlatan ihr zu seiner Zeit und auf seine Weise entsprochen hat. Gewiss nicht immer auf eine säuberliche. Aber die Versuche, profanes Wissen an die Massen heranzubringen, sind noch niemals desinteressiert gewesen. Dennoch stellten sie einen Fortschritt dar. Oft hat ihm der Charlatan selbst noch da gedient, wo er am rücksichtslosesten seinem Vorteil nachging. Ein Cagliostro und Saint-Germain rächten den dritten Stand an der Herrenkaste. Sie waren authentische Zeitgenossen von Beaumarchais.”
― Walter Benjamin, Kritiken und Rezensionen

“Esses crentes chegam muito falantes, enfiados em ternos, a gravata apertando o gogó, o cabelo na risca do pente. Mas só de olhar para os pés a gente já sabe do que se trata. Antes de falar em Deus, falam no dízimo, antes de falar em Cristo, falam no diabo. Já viu como o diabo não sai da boca desse gente? Não têm caridade, só interesse. Caixeiros-viajantes.”
― Micheliny Verunschk, Caminhando com os Mortos

“En ocasiones mantengo cerrada la boca:
es mejor ser prudente y cauto de pensamiento,
taciturno e inmóvil como una sencilla roca,
¡qué charlatán, sutil y voluble como el viento!”
― Elvis Dino Esquivel, Sólo lloré en otoño

“If a man who has no knowledge about anything speaks as if he has knowledge about everything, he is the king of charlatans!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan