Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.

I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead.