“This is where we are today. If somewhere in all this, wisdom—or the love of wisdom, which is virtually the same thing—has survived, we can ascribe the fact only to the benevolence of some higher power, or, perhaps, to the hidden thirst of humanity, which longs for wisdom often even without knowing what it is longing for. We have also to give credit to the courage and prowess of a few individuals who are spread out so thinly over the centuries that it is no exaggeration to call their line a thread. Because this line is a precious one—very likely the most precious of all—it is also appropriate to call it a golden thread.” - Richard Smoley
“What was more, it seems that these very suspicions had been entertained by outstanding men of learning five hundred years before, and—if we are to believe the tradition—long before that as well. The history that everyone could hear from orthodox sources concealed a secret process of transmission that went back, apparently (or not apparently), to the beginnings, the genesis of civilized human awareness. The story was somehow written within.” - The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians: The World's Most Mysterious Secret Society. Tobias Churton