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...Wisdom says: be strong! Then canst thou bear more joy. Be not animal; refine thy rapture! If thou drink, drink by the eight and ninety rules of art: if thou love, exceed by delicacy; and if thou do aught joyous, let there be subtlety therein!
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
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I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA.
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Adaptation to one's environment makes for a sort of survival; but after all, the supreme victory is only won by those who prove themselves of so much hardier stuff than the rest that no power on earth is able to destroy them. The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
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Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and had better come first. Purity means singleness. God is one. The Wand is not a Wand if it has something sticking to it which is not an essential part of itself. If you wish to invoke Venus, you do not succeed if there are traces of Saturn mixed up with it.
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As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.
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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.
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The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.
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Every man and every woman is a star.
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I am inclined to agree with the Head Master of Eton that pæderastic passions among schoolboys 'do no harm'; further, I think them the only redeeming feature of sexual life at public schools.
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The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing. Its overshadowing formlessness obsesses the mind. The way to beat an enemy is to define him clearly, to analyse and measure him. Once an idea is intelligently grasped, it ceases to threaten the mind with the terrors of the unknown.
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She certainly gave me what I've been losing. Youth's intensity, its craving, the soul-priapism, huge lust and fierce to her, clamour for her to realize with me that mightiest marriage-dream, that Sacrament of Satan that may be consummated only beneath Night's dome, in utmost silence, because its Elements are not symbols of things, but They themselves.
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Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.
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Love is the law, love under will.
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There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt. Love is the law, love under will.
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There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.
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Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one's neighbor is superior to oneself.
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I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.
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His own infinity becomes zero in relation to that of the least fragment of the solid. He hardly exists at all. Trillions multiplies by trillions of trillions of such as he could not cross the frontier even of breadth, the idea which he came to guess at only because he felt himself bound by some mysterious power.
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Intolerance is evidence of impotence.