Apuleius Quotes

It is a difficult matter to keep love imprisoned.

I besprinkled their faces with my liquid dung and forced them to leave off.

Days when I came to flower serenely in Lycée gardens long ago, and read my Apuleius keenly, but spared no glance for Cicero.

I little esteeme to see your visage and figure, little doe I regard the night and darknesse thereof, for you are my only light.

But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol, of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

Her half-closed eyes were moist and tremulous and languid with desire. I began to drink love from them with thirsty kisses; which revived her spirits a litle.

Where are you taking that ass?

Night fell, and her husband came to bed, and as soon as they had finished kissing and embracing each other, he fell fast asleep. Psyche was not naturally either very strong or very brave, but the cruel power of fate made a virago of her. Holding the carving knife in a murderous grip, she uncovered the lamp and let its light shine on the bed. At once the secret was revealed. There lay the gentlest and sweetest of all wild creatures, Cupid himself, the beautiful Love-god, and at sight of him the flame of the lamp spurted joyfully up and the knife turned its edge for shame. Psyche was terrified. She lost all control of her senses, and pale as death, fell trembling to her knees, where she desperately tried to hide the knife by plunging it in her own heart. She would have succeeded, too, had the knife not shrunk from the crime and twisted itself out of her hand.

Stupid people always dismiss as untrue anything that happens only very seldom, or anything that their minds cannot readily grasp.

Figyelj, olvasóm: gyönyörködni fogsz.

For as teares oftentimes trickle downe the cheekes of him that seeth or heareth some joyfull newes, so I being in this fearfull perplexity, could not forbeare laughing, to see how of Aristomenus I was made like unto a snail [in] his shell.

At last, hopelessly surveying myself all over, I was obliged to face the mortifying fact that I had been transformed not into a bird, but into a plain jackass.

Read the Golden Ass of Apuleius and Les Diaboliques in French.” . . . “Go to Russian Church on Rue Crimée for the music.” . . . “Get back the first volume of Albertine and make annotations . . . write copiously, there is time for everything” . . . “Read Jacques Maritain.

Als die Schandweiber es endlich zuwege gebracht hatten, daß die Tore offenstehen und die Seele ihrer Schwester entblößt vor ihnen liegt, geben sie die Schlupfwinkel ihrer verborgenen Ranke auf und dringen mit den gezückten schwertern der Tücke in die ängltlichen Gedanken des arglosen Mädchens ein.

For incontinent came the daughters of Nereus, singing with tunes melodiously:

And so his life he surrendered to destiny, but his glory he kept for himself.

Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath mooved mee to succour thee. I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven! the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be diposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Aegyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis. Behold I am come to take pitty of thy fortune and tribulation, behold I am present to favour and ayd thee, leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away all thy sorrow, for behold the healthfull day which is ordained by my providence, therefore be ready to attend to my commandement. This day which shall come after this night, is dedicated to my service, by an eternall religion, my Priests and Ministers doe accustome after the tempests of the Sea, be ceased, to offer in my name a new ship as a first fruit of my Navigation.

They resemble in character, though not in bodily appearance, wicked and foolish men.  I might indeed say they are worse, inasmuch as they have grown old in iniquity, and incorrigible by punishment.  Their mind, as Apuleius says, is a sea tossed with tempest, having no rallying point of truth or virtue in their soul from which they can resist their turbulent and depraved emotions.

No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age. A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

Întrebând, în locul meu, pe un iubitor de vorbire în public cu gura mare, așa cum este avocatul acuzatorului meu, vă va răspunde și el, în felul său, mai ales dacă are o oarecare pricepere în a cuvânta, că nicio altă parte a corpului nu trebuie îngrijită cu mai mare stăruință ca gura și, mai adaug eu, pentru că ea este ușa prin care iese orice vorbire, este vestibulul sufletului și o anticameră a gândirii. La rândul meu, voi spune, pur și simplu că, după umila mea părere, pentru un bărbat liber și liberal, nimic nu este mai indecent decât o gură murdară. Este o parte a omului care, prin poziția ei elevată, atrage atenția de la bun început [...]. Gura atrage atenția înainte de toate și când tace și, mai ales, când vorbește.

We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books. Just childishness, on our part. The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that. One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne. It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has blabbed about children's stories. Why?—Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly. The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.

The author of Eros and Psyche, Lucius Apuleius, an initiate of the ancient mystery schools touched on the knowledge of the soul to achieve union with the Divine, by the agency of a spiritual love. Lucius Apuleius lived in Carthage, and his name was still mentioned 200 years after his death in this North African city; until St. Augustine, the most influential writer of Catholicism came along. Through the centuries Christianity flourished, and the esoteric wisdom went into obscurity, along with the story of Eros and Psyche. The story deals with subjects the church frowns upon, having a direct contact with the immortal soul, and connecting with the esoteric divine, and not the divine of the Catholic church. Up until this present moment, it's not a coincidence the story of Eros and Psyche has been considered a child's fable for almost 2,000 years.

O holy and blessed dame, the perpetuall comfort of humane kind, who by thy bounty and grace nourishest all the world, and hearest a great affection to the adversities of the miserable, as a loving mother thou takest no rest, neither art thou idle at any time in giving thy benefits, and succoring all men, as well on land as sea; thou art she that puttest away all stormes and dangers from mans life by thy right hand, whereby likewise thou restrainest the fatall dispositions, appeasest the great tempests of fortune and keepest backe the course of the stars: the gods supernall doe honour thee: the gods infernall have thee in reverence: thou environest all the world, thou givest light to the Sunne, thou governest the world, thou treadest downe the power of hell: By thy meane the times returne, the Planets rejoyce, the Elements serve: at thy commandment the winds do blow, the clouds increase, the seeds prosper, and the fruits prevaile, the birds of the aire, the beasts of the hill, the serpents of the den, and the fishes of the sea, do tremble at thy majesty, but my spirit is not able to give thee sufficient praise, my patrimonie is unable to satisfie thy sacrifice, my voice hath no power to utter that which I thinke, no if I had a thousand mouths and so many tongues: Howbeit as a good religious person, and according to my estate, I will alwaies keepe thee in remembrance and close thee within my breast.

But I have said enough about the negative side of the anima. There are just as many important positive aspects. The anima is, for instance, responsible for the fact that a man is able to find the right marriage partner. Another function is at least equally important: Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length that excludes irrelevancies but allows the voice of the Great Man to be heard. In establishing this inner “radio” reception, the anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and to the Self. That is how she appears in the example of the initiations of shamans that I described earlier; this is the role of Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius, the famous author of The Golden Ass, in order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life.

According to a legend preserved in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, the tormented nymph Io, when released from Argus by Hermes, fled, in the form of a cow, to Egypt; and there, according to a later legend, recovering her human form, gave birth to a son identified as Serapis, and Io became known as the goddess Isis. The Umbrian master Pinturicchio (1454–1513) gives us a Renaissance version of her rescue, painted in 1493 on a wall of the so-called Borgia Chambers of the Vatican for the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (Fig. 147). Figure 147. Isis with Hermes Trismegistus and Moses (fresco, Renaissance, Vatican, 1493) Pinturicchio shows the rescued nymph, now as Isis, teaching, with Hermes Trismegistus at her right hand and Moses at her left. The statement implied there is that the two variant traditions are two ways of rendering a great, ageless tradition, both issuing from the mouth and the body of the Goddess. This is the biggest statement you can make of the Goddess, and here we have it in the Vatican—that the one teaching is shared by the Hebrew prophets and Greek sages, derived, moreover, not from Moses’s God,17 but from that goddess of whom we read in the words of her most famous initiate, Lucius Apuleius (born c. a.d. 125): I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in hell, the principal of them that dwell in heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell are disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names.

The earliest medieval logical curriculum, studied from the time of Alcuin’s On Dialectic (late 780s?) until the late tenth century, was based mainly on the accounts of logic in the encyclopedias of Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville and Martianus Capella, together with Apuleius’s Periermenias (an account of basic Aristotelian syllogistic) and the Ten Categories, a paraphrase-commentary of Aristotle’s Categories. The last of these was written in the circle of Themistius, but attributed in the Middle Ages to Augustine. This misattribution points to one of the reasons why logic had such a large place in early medieval education: it was seen as indispensable in theological discussion, both because it provided a way of posing fundamental questions about God and his relation to his creation, and because it furnished a formidable argumentative weapon in controversy.

She had devoted time to improving her reading and was now more than proficient. The shelf she'd first cleared with Bianca overflowed with tales of King Arthur and his knights, Ovid's poetry, plays by Sophocles, Aristotle and Aeschylus, Apuleius, names she loved repeating in her mind because the mere sound of them conjured the drama, pageantry, passion, transformations and suffering of their heroes and heroines. One of her favorite writers was Geoffrey Chaucer-- his poems of pilgrims exchanging stories as they traveled to a shrine in Canterbury were both heart aching and often sidesplittingly funny. Admittedly, one of the reasons she loved Chaucer was because she could read him for herself. It was the same reason she picked up Shakespeare over and over, and the works of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle upon Tyne. They all wrote in English. Regarded as quite the eccentric, the duchess was a woman of learning who, like Rosamund, was self-taught. Her autobiography, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life, a gift from Mr. Henderson, gave Rosamund a model to emulate. Here was a woman who dared to consider not only philosophy, science, astronomy and romance, but to write about her reflections and discoveries in insightful ways. Defying her critics, she determined that women were men's intellectual equal, possessed of as quick a wit and as many subtleties if only given the means to express themselves-- in other words, access to education.

She is always ready to bring to life feminine characters who are active, enterprising, and courageous, in contrast to the traditional concept of the Sicilian woman as a passive and withdrawn creature. (This strikes me as a personal, conscious choice.) She passes completely over what I should say was the dominant element in the majority of Sicilian tales: amorous longing, a predilection for the theme of love as exemplified in the lost husband or wife motif, so widespread in Mediterranean folklore and dating back to the oldest written example, the Hellenistic tale of Amor and Psyche told in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (second century A.D.) and repeated through the ages in hundreds and hundreds of stories about encounters and separations, mysterious bridegrooms from the nether regions, invisible brides, and horse- or serpent-kings who turn into handsome young men at night.

Apuleius was never separated from his little Mercury (Apol., 63, 3).

It is a difficult matter to keep love imprisoned.” ​— ​APULEIUS