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
“They sat as if the weight of the world had in this minute been lifted from them both and left them dumb with surprise. But this lasted only for the moment. Arthur held her murderously tight, as if to vanquish her spirit even in the first short contest. But she responded to him, as if she would break him first. It was stalemate, and they sought relief from the great decision they had just brought upon themselves. He spoke to her softly, and she nodded her head to his words without knowing what they meant. Neither did Arthur know what he was saying; both transmission and reception were drowned, and they broke through to the opened furrows of the earth.”
― Alan Sillitoe, quote from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
“Then there was the bhaiyyani next door, who Santosh started fucking two days after she got her first period and has been fucking steadily for five years, with the threat: “If you don’t allow me to fuck you I’ll kill you.” He climbs into her window when her drunk father is away, or passed out, and rapes her. There is nothing gentle about sexuality in the slum; it is furtive and feral. Once, a group of boys was spying on a couple asleep near the door of their room; the man had a hand on one of his wife’s breasts. Santosh reached in through the opening for the letterbox and started squeezing the wife’s other breast; she slept on, thinking that her husband was squeezing both. When she felt the extra pressure on one, she woke up and screamed but was too afraid to tell her husband what had happened. Much of what a woman in the slum puts up with she endures silently, because, as Sunil points out, “How can she tell the world what has been done to her?” They go after women who are vulnerable: the very young, the children or wives of drunkards, or women not right in the head. When their men discover what’s being done to them, they too most often keep it quiet. Who would want the world to know? What does it say about their manliness, that they were unable to protect their women? I”
― Suketu Mehta, quote from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“I don't know if there is any place on this earth that I belong.”
― John Jakes, quote from Heaven and Hell
“People stared. Maybe because they were giants compared to everyone else, both in height and muscle mass. Maybe because of the telltale bulge of weapons at their waist. Or maybe because William opened a bag of Doritos and ate while he shopped. Hard to tell.”
― Gena Showalter, quote from The Darkest Secret
“sometimes relationships don't make sense or fit into natural order, sometimes are were written in the stars.”
― Rachel Higginson, quote from Fearless Magic
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