"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness."
— Aleister Crowley (The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography)

"Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning, secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to it occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline its ear to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs"
— Gertrude Atherton (The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories)

"The awakening of a new basic attitude towards existence is not the first thing that we must do, but the first thing that must happen in us... Only when this completely irrational, above - moral, and above - personal transformation has taken place inside of us will all instructions given here gain a sense. There is no directive and no rule which could replace this unique act or could be compared with it. "
— Dr. Ernst Schertel (Magic: History, Theory, Practice)

"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."
— Peter J. Carroll (Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic)

"Today, in the worldwide circus of the images, occultism is the continuation of fashions, of habits or mannerisms of how to display oneself: pseudo-originality. The occult supermarket is universally plundered and leaves only a completely devalued treasury of total subjectivity. By picking the debris left after the breakdown of the symbolic order, the occultist's cultural reality ends up consisting of slightly differing arrangements of said pieces into signs of strict hierarchies. Normal activities one might expect in joining such a group, such as experiencing, recording and processing are curbed and one is reduced to subsistence on a diet of already fixed images that work in a consciousness dissolving away."
— P.R. Koenig