Luke > Luke's Quotes

“30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.
31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

“The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

“Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,
Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

“The first condition of success in magick is purity of purpose.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Moonchild

“Keep on acquiring a taste for what is naturally repugnant; this is an unfailing source of pleasure.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

“A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.”
― Aleister Crowley

“Thou hast no right but to do thy will... For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

“Belief is the enemy of knowledge.”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, ''Of couse I am - sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”
― Max Stirner

“Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.”
― Max Stirner

“Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“All things are Nothing to Me”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority

“My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“The people is dead! Good-day, Self!”
― Max Stirner

“Political liberty,” what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the State and to the State’s laws... Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free; not, therefore, that I am free from the State, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my liberty, but the liberty of a power that rules and subjugates me; it means that one of my despots, like State, religion, conscience, is free. State, religion, conscience, these despots, make me a slave, and their liberty is my slavery.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“If i cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are, not on account of my beholding in you a ghost, an appearing spirit, but from egoistic pleasure; you yourself with *your* essence are valuable to me.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.”
― Max Stirner

“He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook.”
― Max Stirner

“The people’s good fortune is my misfortune!”
― Max Stirner

“For only he who is alive is in the right.”
― Max Stirner

“It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want; what does the nation care for that? By the manure of their corpses the nation comes to "its bloom"! The individuals have died "for the great cause of the nation," and the nation sends some words of thanks after them and - has the profit of it. I call that a paying kind of egoism.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own and The False Principle of Our Education

“Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes; woe to all that is not well pleasing to him. He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is - a purely egoistic cause.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own and The False Principle of Our Education

“Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for "one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether! For we are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own