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
“I begin with the respect that the anarch shows towards the rules. Respectare as an intensive of respicere means: ‘to look back, to think over, to take into account.’ These are traffic rules. The anarchist resembles a pedestrian who refuses to acknowledge them and is promptly run down. Even a passport check is disastrous for him.
‘I never saw a cheerful end,’ as far back as I can look into history. In contrast, I would assume that men who were blessed with happiness – Sulla, for example – were anarchs in disguise.”
― Ernst Jünger, quote from Eumeswil
“Sometime before sleep it occurred to me that the true nature of being without might mean never knowing what one lacked.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“He smacked the heel of his hand against his forhead, as if that could knock the mental picture out of his head. Hell, he though irritably, he didn't want to knock the image just out of his head. He wanted to send it clear across the room and out the window.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Brighter Than the Sun
“Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to think of them as trainee humans. Inadequate adults. She loved her own daughters well enough - wanted them to be happy and so forth - but they had failed to inspire in her that mad, lioness passion to which other mothers so preeningly testified. She was still in some shock regarding the servility of motherhood - the sheer, thankless drudgery of it. All the cleaning up of messes she had made and preparing meals she did not want to eat. She fed her girls regularly and diligently brushed their teeth twice a day and made sure they were more or less appropriately dressed for the weather, but beyond a dull sense of satisfaction at having fulfilled her maternal duties, she received no pleasure from performing these tasks. Try as she might, she she could not feel her daughters' happiness and sorrows as her own.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from The Believers
“Jesus loves you.”
“Then how come he never calls?”
― Jeri Smith-Ready, quote from Requiem for the Devil
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