Quotes from Austin Osman Spare

Darken your room, shut the door, empty your mind. You are still in great company.

Embrace reality by imagination.

Art is the instinctive application of the knowledge latent in the subconscious.

The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.

Art can contradict Science.

The more Chaotic I am, the more complete I am.

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

And remember, you shall suffer all things and again suffer: until you have sufficient sufferance to accept all things.

Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity

Darken your room, shut the door, empty your mind. Yet you are still in great company - the Numen and your Genius with all their media, and your host of elementals and ghosts of your dead loves — are there! They need no light by which to see, no words to speak, no motive to enact except through your own purely formed desire.

Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. 'Learning' will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist.

In our solitariness... great depths are sometimes sounded. Truth hideth in company.

Others believe in prayer . . . . have not all yet learnt, that to ask it to be denied? Let it be the root of your Gospel. Oh, ye who are living other peoples lives! Unless desire is subconscious, it is not fulfilled, no, not in this life. Then verily sleep is better than prayer. Quiescence is hidden desire, a form of "not asking"; by it the female obtains much from man.

The soul is the ancestral animals. The body is their knowledge.

Other than damnation I know no magic to satisfy your wishes; for ye believe one thing, desire another, speak unlike, act differently and obtain the living value.

The learning of 'How' is the eternal 'Why' – unanswered! A genius is such, because he does not know how or why.

The one law of Art is its own spontaneity, its pleasure and freedom. How mystic, pure and simple is its wish; it has no idea of potential divinity! Decoration is its creed and vital allegory is its belief. Being the 'Free Morality,' it has no sin – then most assuredly Art is all we dare express without excuse.

Servitude to law is the hatred of Heaven.58 Only self-love is the eternal all-pleasing, which is achieved by meditation on this radiant self which is mystic joyousness.

It was the straying that found the path direct.

This conglomeration of decayed antiquity, collected with the disease of greed, surely invites our charity. It would be better to forget these trumpery ideas, and learn the best of traditions by observing your own functions, and regarding modernity in an unbiased way.10

Criminals of folly? Ye but sin against self

He who is lawless is free. Necessity and time are conventional phenomena. Without hypocrisy or fear ye could do as ye wish

Is this world's worst reality more vicious than human behavior?

Human nature is the worst possible! Once I lived among ye. From self-decency now I habitate the waste places, a willing outcast; associate of goats, cleaner far, more honest than men.