Aleister Crowley · 960 pages
Rating: (658 votes)
“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life....”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
“Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, quote from The Time of the Hero
“We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good... It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Best and the Brightest
“People don't hate each other. They hate each other's ideas.”
― Nick Cole, quote from The Old Man and the Wasteland
“In human life, the soul is the passenger, the body the chariot, conscience the charioteer and mind the reins. The different senses are the horses, all the items of enjoyment are the roads, and the soul with senses and the mind attached to it has to use them. If there is no chariot, where will the soul sit? How will he get to the battlefield of life quickly? How will he fight the enemy? Therefore, one must not underrate the importance of the chariot i.e., the body.”
― Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar, quote from Yayati: A Classic Tale of Lust
“How first loves and touches didn’t come close to being given the rare privilege of being someone’s last kiss.”
― Jack L. Pyke, quote from Backlash
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.