Quotes from Peter J. Carroll

All Philosophy is Biography

That which is denied gains power, and seeks strange and unexpected forms of manifestation.

As a great master once observed: "There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse." Let the mind become as a flame or a pool of still water.

We can only escape the bloody and ignorant nightmare of history by exploring alternatives which today look frighteningly weird.

Space , time , mass, and energy originate from Chaos , have their being in Chaos, and through th agency of the aether are moved by Chaos into the multiple forms of existence.

Science has brought us power and ideas but not the wisdom or responsibility to handle them.

If only one fifth of your spells work you have real power. If only one fifth of your divinations work you have a serious disability.

Laughter is the only tenable attitude in a universe which is a joke played on itself.

Some have sought to avoid suffering by avoiding desire. Thus they have only small desires and small sufferings, poor fools.

In a stagnant environment the body-mind creates its own adversity – disease and fantasy.

Junk food, junk religion, and junk products just leads to excessive numbers of junk people living junk lifestyles.

It is a mistake to consider any belief more liberated than another. It is the possibility of change which is important. Every new form of liberation is destined to eventually become another form of enslavement for most of its adherents. There is no freedom from duality on this plane of existence, but one may at least aspire to choice of duality.

Those who self-righteously value their own contradictions are mighty on this Earth.

Junk food, junk religion, and junk products just leads to excessive numbers of junk people living junk lifestyles.

A] competent magician should have the ability to stand still at a bus stop with closed eyes and have the entire universe disappear apart from a single blazing visualised sigil or muttered spell.

Ideas about a person's place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians.

Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.

Governments will be provided with the choice of either accommodating themselves to co-ordinating proliferating human variety or seeking to reduce that variety by repressive measures.

Half of the skill in magick consists of identifying probabilities worth enhancing.

Always consider the qualifications of anyone who assumes or professes authority, what do they really know? Authorities on spirituality can rarely give a half coherent explanation of what they persuade us to believe they know. They achieve authority by stage management and then exploit audience suggestibility. Same old trick they have pulled for thousands of years.

The starry-eyed idealists of today have submerged their critical faculties beneath a tidal wave of slop marketed by those old hippies who now sell a user-friendly dilution of their original enlightenment.

Never join a conspiracy that you could possibly betray, because if you could, someone else will.

If in doubt, always attempt to force the hand of chance.

As belief in one's capabilities self-evidently leads to increasing capabilities, magicians consider it worthwhile to believe in their ability to accomplish the impossible, even if they only succeed at this occasionally.