It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own.

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time." But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."

We have a tendency to overcome any strong tension between desire and impotence by depreciating or denying the positive value of the desired object.

The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

At one time in his life the apostate radically changes his political, religious or philosophical convictions by taking up all possible means of argumentation against that which he formerly held to be true, and lives now for the sake of its negation. His new ideas and opinions consist in continuous acts of revenge on his spiritual past.

And striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form.

Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

The great honor of Christianity, its incontestable merit, and the whole secret of its unprecedented and yet thoroughly legitimate triumph, lay in the fact that it appealed to that suffering and immense public to which the ancient world, a strict and cruel intellectual and political aristocracy, denied even the simplest rights of humanity. Otherwise it never could have spread.

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

For as only one thing is necessary, and as the theme of the talk is the willing of only one thing: hence the consciousness before God of one's eternal responsibility to be an individual is that one thing necessary.

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?... Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law.

The chief impression left by a study of Crowley's life and works is that he wasted an immense amount of time and energy trying to shock everyone he came into contact with, and his dislike of orthodoxy turned him into an unconsciously comic figure, like Don Quixote.

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality.

The very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past.

Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: 'here are our monsters', without immediately turning the monsters into pets.

...the prisoner's dreams is the guard's spirituality.

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.

Those who have been inspired to action by the doctrine of the class war will have acquired the habit of hatred, and will instinctively seek new enemies when the old ones have been vanquished. But in actual fact the psychology of the working man in any of the Western democracies is totally unlike that which is assumed in the Communist Manifesto. He does not by any means feel that he has nothing to lose but his chains, nor indeed is this true. The chains which bind Asia and Africa in subjection to Europe are partly riveted by him. He is himself part of a great system of tyranny and exploitation. Universal freedom would remove, not only his own chains, which are comparatively light, but the far heavier chains which he has helped to fasten upon the subject races of the world.

Survive in such a way that you avoid limiting others who are also trying to survive. We all live in limited systems. This is the core of ethics.

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

How can even the lowest mind, if he reflects at all the marvels of this earth and sky, the brilliant fashioning of plants and animals, remain blind to the fact that this wonderful world with its settled order must have a maker to design, determine and direct it?

What! the inventors of ancient civilisations, the first makers of tools and tape lines, the first builders of vehicles, ships, and houses, the first observers of the laws of the heavens and the multiplication tables is it contended that they were entirely different from the inventors and observers of our own time, and superior to them? And that the first slow steps forward were of a value which has not been equalled by the discoveries we have made with all our travels and circumnavigations of the earth?

I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem - a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.

Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.

If all men, by the act of being born, are destined to suffer violence, that is a truth to which the empire of circumstances closes their minds.

Equality, proclaimed in 1793, has been one of the greatest conquests of the French Revolution. Despite all the reactions which have arrived since, that great principle has triumphed in the political economy of Europe. In the most advanced countries, it is called the equality of politic rights; in the other countries, civil equality - equality before the law. No country in Europe would dare to openly proclaim today the principle of political inequality. But the history of the revolution itself and that of the seventy-five years that have passed since, we prove that political equality without economic equality is a lie. You would proclaim in vain the equality of political rights, as long as society remains split by its economic organization into socially different layers - that equality will be nothing but a fiction.

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.

Egoism you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves.

I am a pattern watcher.

We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only.

We cannot stand by while the social contract is broken by those who chose conflict over equality. Those that want equal treatment for themselves have to treat others equally. They cannot lead with exclusion, then turn around and demand equal treatment. It is a double standard. If they are going to exclude first, then justice demands that we, the group that stands with universality, follow our duty to react and exclude those that exclude.

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.

The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.