René Guénon - Knowledge Quotes

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The traditional sciences … constitute … a preparation for a higher knowledge and a way of approach to it, and by virtue of their hierarchical arrangement according to the levels of existence to which they refer, they form, as it were, so many rungs by which it is possible to climb to the level of pure intellectuality. It is only too clear that modern sciences cannot in any way serve either of these purposes; this is why they can be no more than profane science, whereas the traditional sciences … are effectively incorporated in sacred science.

René Guénon

It is, however, only in the nineteenth century that one sees men beginning to glory in their ignorance—for to proclaim oneself an agnostic means nothing else—and claiming to forbid others any knowledge to which they themselves have no access; and this marked one stage further in the intellectual decline of the West.

René Guénon

There is exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere becoming, leaving no place for the changeless and permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this same becoming, denying by implication true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, by which we mean the transcendent and universal principles.

René Guénon