Henry Steel Olcott on Helena Blavatsky

“She was a splendid pianist, playing with a touch and expression that were simply superb. Her hands were models—ideal and actual—for a sculptor and never seen to such advantage as when flying over the keyboard to find its magical melodies... There were times when she was occupied by one of the Mahâtmas, when her playing was indescribably grand. She would sit in the dusk sometimes, with nobody else in the room beside myself, and strike from the sweettoned instrument improvisations that might well make one fancy he was listening to the Gandhâvas, or heavenly choristers. It was the harmony of heaven...she was loyal to the last degree to her aunt, her other relatives, and to the Masters; for whose work she would have sacrificed not only one, but twenty lives, and calmly seen the whole human race consumed with fire, if needs be.”

“From boyhood no problem had interested me so much as the mystery of man... [On meeting H.P.B.,] our acquaintance at once ripened into a friendship. We found ourselves to be congenial in opinion, and she brought to our intercourse the great resources of a mind stored with a mass of erudition with regard to the arcane or esoteric philosophies of the ancient times. I found her the most intellectual woman I had ever met in my life, a very eccentric personage, but a person who compelled you to either like her very much or to be very antagonistic to her. Besides these extraordinary literary and mental accomplishments of hers, she also possessed in a very striking degree psychical powers such as we read about in the accounts of the lives of ancient sages, and the proof of the reality of which powers was vouchsafed to many witnesses in America for years before we sailed from New York for India; so that naturally those of us who knew her in those times and subsequently, have been unaffected by all the imputations upon her character that have been so rife during the later years of her life... I now look back to that meeting as the most fortunate event of my life; for it made light shine in all the dark places, and sent me out on a mission to help to revive... occult science, which grows more absorbingly interesting every day.”

“Unconventionality was with her almost a cult, and nothing pleased her more than to do and say things to shock the prudish... HPB felt herself in revolt to every conventional idea of society, being in beliefs, tastes, dress, ideals, and behavior a social helot; ...The world was to her an empty sham, its prizes but dross, her waking life a lugubrious existence, her real life that of the night when, leaving the body, she would go and sit at the feet of her Masters. So she felt little else than scorn and profound contempt for the blind bigots and narrow-thinking men of science, who had not even a stray glimpse of the truth, yet who would judge her with unrighteous judgment and conspire to silence her by a conspiracy of calumny. For clergymen as a body she felt hatred, because, being themselves absolutely ignorant of the truths of the spirit, they assumed the right to lead the spiritually blind, to keep the lay conscience under control, to enjoy revenues they had not earned, and to damn the heretic, who was often the sage, the illuminatus, the adept. We had one scrapbook into which we used to paste paragraphs from the newspapers telling of the crimes of clergymen and priests who had been brought to justice, and before we left for India there was a large collection of them. HPB made numberless friends, but often lost them again and saw them turned into personal enemies. No one could be more fascinating than she when she chose, and she chose it when she wanted to draw persons to her public work. She would be caressing in tone and manner, and make the person feel that she regarded him as her best, if not her only friend.”