Quotes

The gods exist, but then cannot be harnessed to the ends of man; they seem familiar in their humanity, they can even be laughed at, but still they remain distant. In a certain sense they are the polar contrast to man. The line which separates gods and men: mortals moving towards their end on one side, deathless gods on the other. However much the gods may rage or even suffer, all their stir lacks the true seriousness which comes in mankind from the possibility of destruction.

We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is…

And straight I knew him for the mystic one
That is the brother, born of human dream,
Of man rebellious at an unknown rod;
The minds ideal, and the spirit’s sun;
A column of clear flame, in lands extreme,
Set opposite the darkness that is God.

Clark Ashton Smith, A Vision of Lucifer

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will.

There are two important consequences of globalization. First, it extends the Third World model to industrial countries. In the Third World, there’s a two-tiered society-a sector of extreme wealth and privilege, and a sector of huge misery and despair among useless, superfluous people.

That division is deepened by the policies dictated by the West. It imposes a neoliberal “free market” system that directs resources to the wealthy and to foreign investors, with the idea that something will trickle down by magic, some time after the Messiah comes.

O Lucifer! Voluntarily and disdainfully thou didst detach thyself from the heaven where the sun drowned thee in his splendor, to plow with thine own rays the unworked fields of light! Thou shinest when the sun sets, and thy sparkling gaze precedes the daybreak! Thou fallest to rise again; thou tastest of death to understand life better! For the ancient glories of the world, thou art the evening star, for truth renascent, the lovely star of dawn.

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.