Mary Renault book The Mask of Apollo
Source: The Mask of Apollo (1966)
Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: 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.
Mary Renault book The Mask of Apollo
Source: The Mask of Apollo (1966)
Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion
Source: The God Delusion (2006), pp. 347-348 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007
“I hope the days get longer and make this love grow stronger.”
William Fitzsimmons (1978) American musician
Until When We Are Ghosts (2006), Forsake All Others
Michael Pollan book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
Source: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
“Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?”
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist
Consider The Lobster
Essays
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
The monster to Robert Walton
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.
Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher
Other texts
Source: The Core, in: An Olaf Stapledon Reader, Syracuse University Press, New York 1997: pp. 266-272.
“Quick-loving hearts… may quickly loathe.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning book Sonnets from the Portuguese
Source: Sonnets from the Portuguese