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.

There is no grace: there is no guilt: This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.

What is necessary is not to seek after some fantastic ideal, utterly unsuited to our real needs, but to discover the true nature of those needs, to fulfill them, and rejoice therein.

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.