| Quote | Source |
| The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbour 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. | Chapter 3 |
| The people who have really made history are the martyrs. | Chapter 4 |
| I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner. | Chapter 5 |
| 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. | Chapter 5 |
| Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life. | Chapter 8 |
| The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript. | Chapter 10 |
| It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair. | Chapter 14 |
| 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. | Chapter 17 |
| Indubitably, Magick 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. | Chapter 20 |
| Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people. | Chapter 22 |
| To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. | Chapter 23 |
| Almost all religious tyranny springs from intellectual narrowness. | Chapter 28 |
| One has to be a philosopher to endure the consciousness of waste, and something more than a philosopher to admire the spendthrift splendour of the universe. | Chapter 31 |
| The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing. | Chapter 33 |
| I would rather bear physical starvation than intellectual starvation, any day of the week. It is one of the most frightful consequences of increasing age that one finds fewer and fewer of one's contemporaries worth talking to. One is forced more and more to seek society either with the great masters of the past or with discarnate intelligences. | Chapter 37 |
| Whether we hold free will or determinism, we equally ratify every type of opinion and conduct. | Chapter 44 |
| Women, like all moral inferiors, behave well only when treated with firmness, kindness and justice. They are always on the look-out to detect wavering or irritation in the master; and their one hope is to have a genuine grievance to hug. When trouble is not suppressed permanently by a little friendly punishment, it is a sign that the virtue has gone out of the master. | Chapter 46 |
| Throughout my life I have repeatedly found that destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say "No". I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible. One may be wholeheartedly eager to do something which is as easy as falling off a log; and yet it is impossible. | Chapter 48 |
| Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another. | Chapter 49 |
| Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty. | Chapter 50 |
| Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not. | Chapter 50 |
| I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck. | Chapter 54 |
| Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas - stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety. | Chapter 54 |
| 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. | Chapter 54 |
| Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points. | Chapter 56 |
| Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. | Chapter 57 |
| They look for a victim to chivvy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally allowable emotion, it may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman. | Chapter 57 |
| Sexual excitement is merely a degraded form of divine ecstasy. | Chapter 61 |
| To defend oneself against the accusations of a knave is to seek justice from the verdict of fools. | Chapter 62 |
| Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness. | Chapter 64 |
| If you have a secret, it is always dangerous to let people suspect that you have something to hide. | Chapter 64 |
| One does not wipe out a lustre of lunacy by a moment of sanity. | Chapter 65 |
| 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. | Chapter 65 |
| When one walks, one is brought into touch first of all with the essential relations between one's physical powers and the character of the country; one is compelled to see it as its natives do. Then every man one meets is an individual. One is no longer regarded by the whole population as an unapproachable and uninteresting animal to be cheated and robbed. | Chapter 67 |
| To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilise them. | Chapter 68 |
| To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honourable to which a man can be called? | Chapter 68 |
| Intolerance is evidence of impotence. | Chapter 69 |
| Nothing can save the world but the universal acceptance of the Law of Thelema as the sole and sufficient basis of conduct. | Chapter 80 |
| In the absence of will-power the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless. | Chapter 80
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