“Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.”

“The Great Work is the uniting of opposites. It may mean the uniting ofthe soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the femalewith the male, of the ego with the non-ego—or what not.”

“Every man and every woman is a star.”

“The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.”

“Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.”

“The Universe is the Practical Joke of the Generalat the expense of the Particular, quoth FRATERPERDURABO, and laughed.But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing theUniversal Sorrow.Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.Below these certain disciples wept,Then certain laughed.Others next wept.Others next laughed.Next others wept.Next others laughed.Last came those that wept because they could notsee the Joke, and those that laughed lest theyshould be thought not to see the Joke, and thoughtit safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.But though FRATER PERDURABO laughedopenly, He also at the same time wept secretly;and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept.Nor did He mean what He said.”

“Nothing any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments. The Genius who wrote The Ancient Mariner is no less sublime than he who wrote The Tempest; but Coleridge had some incapacity to catch and express the thoughts of his genius - was ever such wooden stuff as his conscious work? - while Shakespeare had the knack of acquiring the knowledge necessary to the expression of every conceivable harmony, and his technique was sufficiently fluent to transcribe with ease.”