I couldn’t see any sense in pretending that life was not full of horrors. Death and trousers are facts in nature; and merely to avoid reference to them or to invent euphemisms for them does not alter their character.

Aleister Crowley, Confessions, Chapter 8

Hermetic quote Crowley Confessions any sense pretending life not full horrors death trousers facts nature avoid reference invent euphemisms does not alter character

Consider also:

  1. “She was silky and sullen and swift and perverse, loving to tease her master with pretended indifference, only to overwhelm him with the greater vehemence at the end, like a cat playing with a mouse. She had all the stealth and self-possession of a cat, moreover; and Cleon thought himself lucky to be beloved of one so skilled in every art of pleasing and exciting.”
  2. “But they were entirely free from the malignant envy, the panic born of prejudice and the perverse passions produced by hypocritically pretending to suppress natural instincts, which one associates with tradesmen in the West End of London and ministers of religion.”
  3. “All that he fears is that when the time comes, he may not be free from those ‘stains of falsehood and dishonour,’ those imperfections of his own nature, that may delay his after-progress.”
  4. “But the orb revolveth anon; the shadow passeth away from thee. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu! For inasmuch as thou hast made the Law of Freedom thine, as thou hast lived in Light and Liberty and Love, thou hast become a Freeman of the City of the Stars.”
  5. “it has been shown that much of the work of Trithemius, Agrippa’s mentor and the progenitor of European ceremonial magick, was actually veiled cryptography, a brutal and embarrassing truth that much of the occult and neopagan revival, which ultimately stems from Trithemius, has never assessed.”