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.”
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life....”
“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”
“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.”
“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
“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.”
“In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society.”
“You want useless, you have come to the right guy. I can be useless for hours at a time. Weeks even. I'm currently closing in on a month of being totally useless, which is by way of being a personal best.”
“If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.”
“From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson’s political life—from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics—his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.”
“Aidan was fascinated by Mr. Stock's hat. Perhaps it had once been a trilby sort of thing. It may once hace even been a definite color. Now it was more like something that had grown - like a fungus - on Mr. Stock's head, so mashed and used and rammed down by earthy hands that you could have thought it was a mushroom that had accidentally grown into a sort of gnome-hat. It had a slightly domed top and a floppy edge. And a definite smell”
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