1910 Quotes

“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: 'Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.'

An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual questions. Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“It was not...a woman's fancy that drove them to it, but an eruption of a long-smolering volcano, an overflow of suffering, abuse and exhaustion.”
― Theresa S. Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker

“The man who worries morning and night about the dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions.”
― L.H. Bailey

“It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship—a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle—which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this—the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind,—is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution.”
― James Morgan Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed

“It is no idle boast of the vermin Socialists that their system is Christianity, and no other is genuine. And look at them! To a man […] they are atheists and in favor of Free Love—whatever that may mean. I have talked with many Socialists, but never with one who understood his subject. Empty babblers they are, muddle-headed philanthropists. They read a shilling abridgement of John Stuart Mill, and settle all economic problems over a --sirloin of turnips-- in some filthy crank food dive. Ask them any question about detail, and the bubble is pricked.”
― Aleister Crowley, The World's Tragedy

“Nothing should be worshipped [sic] that has form or is individuated. The universal Divine Life is alone to be worshipped. There is no colorless pantheism in this concept; for the God of each man is one with the universal God: the Conqueror obtains the Universe, not by being absorbed and obliterated by it, but by transcending the limitations of his individual consciousness and partaking of the universal Divine Consciousness. As an individual he loses nothing but his imperfections, but he gains the All, the "Origin and the Perfection." And this is Seership, which is not "prophecy," "second sight" or sense-perception on any plane of consciousness, but is Direct Cognition of Reality.”
― James Morgan Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed

“MARSYAS:        Beware!
Easily trips the big word "dare."
Each man's an Œdipus, that thinks
He hath the four powers of the Sphinx,
Will, Courage, Knowledge, Silence. Son,
Even the adepts scarce win to one!
The Thoughts—they fall like rotten fruits.
But to destroy the power that makes
These thoughts—thy Self? A man it takes
To tear his soul up by the roots!
This is the mandrake fable, boy!”
― Aleister Crowley, Aha!

“The generative function is strictly nothing but an animal one, and can never be anything else. True spirituality demands its utter extirpation; and while its proper exercise for the continuation of the human race, in the semi-animal stage of its evolution, may not be considered sinful, its misuse, in any way, is fraught with the most terrible consequences physically, psychically and spiritually; and the forces connected with it are used for abnormal purposes only in the foulest practices of sorcery, the inevitable result of which is moral death—the annihilation of the individuality.”
― James Morgan Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed

“MARSYAS:
There are seven keys to the great gate,
Being eight in one and one in eight.
First, let the body of thee be still,
Bound by the cerements of will,
Corpse-rigid; thus thou mayst abort
The fidget-babes that tease the thought.
Next, let the breath-rhythm be low,
Easy, regular, and slow;
So that thy being be in tune
With the great sea's Pacific swoon.
Third, let thy life be pure and calm
Swayed softly as a well-to-live be bound
To the one love of the Profound.
Fifth, let the thought, divinely free
From sense, observe its entity.
Watch every thought that springs; enhance
Hour after hour thy vigilance!
Intense and keen, turned inward, miss
No atom of analysis!
Sixth, on one thought securely pinned
Still every whisper of the wind!
So like a flame straight and unstirred
Burn up thy being in one word!
Next, still that ecstasy, prolong
Thy meditation steep and strong,
Slaying even God, should He distract
Thy attention from the chosen act!
Last, all these things in one o'erpowered,
Time that the midnight blossom flowered!
The oneness is. Yet even in this,
My son, though shalt not do amiss
If thou restrain the expression, shoot
Thy glance to rapture's darkling root,
Discarding name, form, sight, and stress
Even of this high consciousness;
Pierce to the heart! I leave thee here:
Thou art the Master. I revere
Thy radiance that rolls afar,
O Brother of the Silver Star!”
― Aleister Crowley, Aha!

“OLYMPAS:
There is one doubt. When souls attain
Such an unimagined gain
Shall not others mark them, wise
Beyond mere mortal destinies?
MARSYAS:
Such are not the perfect saints.
While the imagination faints
Before their truth, they veil it close
As amid the utmost snows
The tallest peaks most straitly hide
With clouds their lofty heads. Divide
The planes! Be ever as you can
A simple honest gentleman!
Body and manners be at ease.
Not bloat with blazoned sanctities!
Who fights as fights the soldier-saint?
And see the artist-adept paint!
Weak are those souls that fear the stress
Of earth upon their holiness!
The fast, they eat fantastic food,
They prate of beans and brotherhood,
Wear sandals, and long hair, and spats,
And think that makes them Arhats!
How shall man still his spirit-storm?
Rational Dress and Food Reform!
OLYMPAS:
I know such saints.
MARSYAS:
                    An easy vice:
So wondrous well they advertise!
O their mean souls are satisfied
With wind of spiritual pride.
They're all negation. "Do not eat;
What poison to the soul is meat!
Drink not; smoke not; deny the will!
Wine and tobacco make us ill."
Magic is life; the Will to Live
Is one supreme Affirmative.
These things that flinch from Life are worth
No more to Heaven than to Earth.
Affirm the everlasting Yes!
OLYMPAS:
Those saints at least score one success:
Perfection of their priggishness!
MARSYAS:
Enough. The soul is subtlier fed
With meditation's wine and bread.
Forget their failings and our own;
Fix all our thoughts on Love alone!”
― Aleister Crowley, Aha!

“I therefore hold the legendary Jesus in no way responsible for the trouble: it began with Luther, perhaps, and went on with Wesley; but no matter! — what I am trying to get at is the religion which makes England to-day a hell for any man who cares at all for freedom. That religion they call Christianity; the devil they honour they call God. I accept these definitions, as a poet must do, if he is to be at all intelligible to his age, and it is their God and their religion that I hate and will destroy.”
― Aleister Crowley, The World's Tragedy

“Tas mūsų ruošimasis į kovą už mums priderančias žmogaus - piliečio teises — tai naujos saulės pažibai, saulės, dildančios mūsų tėvynės tamsumus ir nuoskaudas!”
― Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė, Apie moterų klausimą

“Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire.”
― Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America

“Mientras recorríamos las calles de la Ciudad de México recordé cómo eran la primera vez que las vi, la terracería, el polvo; y ahora el drenaje, el alumbrado, los caminos pavimentados, los edificios como carbones negros iluminados por los faroles con electricidad, los templos coloniales; el pasado y el futuro mezclados en un presente incierto. Los faros de acetileno alumbraban el camino. Pasamos una última vez por el Palacio de Gobierno y la Catedral. Me hubiera gustado tener tiempo para cambiarme de ropa.”
― Pedro J. Fernández, Yo, Díaz

“Decidimos que lo harían cabalgando en Chapultepec. Escogimos un día cualquiera, me monté en mi caballo y lo conduje algunos metros, mientras una caja negra registraba cada uno de mis movimientos. Días después organizamos una proyección privada en el castillo para ver las imágenes. ¡El blanco y negro cobró vida! Ahí estaba, claro, en una fotografía que se movía. Algunos segundos de mí, montado sobre un caballo, con los ahuehuetes plateados al fondo. Así se filmó la primera película mexicana y me convertí en el primer actor que tuvo el país.”
― Pedro J. Fernández, Yo, Díaz

“Razones siempre habrá para quejarse del que lleve la banda presidencial, pero nunca para apoyar iniciativas o tomar ellos mismos el poder. ¿Cómo perder la oportunidad de echarle la culpa a alguien más? Si el pueblo mexicano se alimentara de críticas, no tendría hambre.”
― Pedro J. Fernández, Yo, Díaz

“Supongo que a él lo recordarán con cariño. La historia lo tratará bien porque murió joven y no le dio tiempo de equivocarse.”
― Pedro J. Fernández, Yo, Díaz