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.

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

The average man cannot believe that an artist may be as serious and highminded an observer of life as the professed man of science.

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.

To me, every dirty act was simply a sacrament of sin, a passionately religious protest against Christianity, which was for me the symbol of all vileness, meanness, treachery, falsehood and oppression.

Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.

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.