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!

He shall fall down into a pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of reason.

The first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.

The sot drinks, and is drunken: the coward drinks not, and shivers: the wise man, brave and free, drinks, and gives glory to the Most High God.

What is it in absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally distinct from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.

The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.

Love is the only principle which makes life tolerable.