I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.
May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!
I’ve often thought that there isn’t any “I” at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.
Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.
A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.
Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them…
One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously but to take it seriously one must be already mad.
Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
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.
Woe to that seven months abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a wall in China!
I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, ”Of couse I am – sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.
Don’t talk for five minutes, there’s a good chap! I’ve a strange feeling come over me–almost as if I were going to think!
Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest
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 sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.
When you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God.”-Review of Ida Craddock’s “Heavenly Bridegrooms
Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine
The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.
The nails from a suicide’s coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.
The word of sin is Restriction. O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart! There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse. Accursed! Accursed be it to the aeons! Hell.
To resist and subdue Nature is to make for one’s self a personal and imperishable life: it is to break free from the vicissitudes of Life and Death.
Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)
Light, Life and Love are like three glow-worms at thy feet: the whole universe of stars, the dewdrops on the grass whereon thou walkest!
The keystone… some have called God, some Brahma, some Zeus… some even IAO… but in truth, O seeker, it is Thy-SELF.
There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.Love is the law, love under will.
Love in a night shall live and die,Love in a day shall wing and fly;Love in the Spring shall last an hour,Easily fade a spring-tide flower.
…in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.
…the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention.
For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.
Thou hast no right but to do thy will… For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.
Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.
She it is, she, that found meIn the morphia honeymoon;With silk and steel she bound meIn her poisonous milk she drowned me,Even now her arms surround me
Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adeptship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois “virtues” which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.
All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.
And allow me again to assure you that when you’ve got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won’t find you have any time to get bored.
Verily, I say unto thee, many are the adepts that have looked upon the back parts of my father, and cried, “our eyes fail before the glory of thy countenance.
Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
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.
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.