Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.
Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one’s neighbor is superior to oneself.
I am alone. There is no God where I am.
How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.
Black magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results – of an extremely temporary nature.
Practically, Science is true; and Faith is foolish.
There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
Sanity is a compromise.
For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.
It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one’s environment.
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!
30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops an does naught. 31. If power asks why, then power is weakness.
Their false compassion is called compassion and their false understanding is called understanding, for this is their most potent spell.
He shall fall down into a pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of reason.
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.
The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the most certain it is that I only assert a limitation.
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.
Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.