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

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

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

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

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

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

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

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.

Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.

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

If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.

I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.

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.

The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.

It is as if the first diviner of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent upon a combination of sacred drugs which should cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul.

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 fulfill it according to the law of light.

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.

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!

Love is the only principle which makes life tolerable.

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.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.

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

A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

Cleverness is not wisdom.

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.

Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.

A man likes his wife to be just clever enough to appreciate his cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.