"If one were to take the Bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the Bible seriously, one must be already mad."
— Aleister Crowley

"Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become 'one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions': a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have --- Greatness."
— Aleister Crowley

"The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without."
— Aleister Crowley

"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal."
— Aleister Crowley

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."
— Aleister Crowley

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
— Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law/Liber Al Vel Legis)

"Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will."
— Aleister Crowley (Magick in Theory and Practice)

"The one unpardonable sin is knowingly and willfully to reject truth."
— Aleister Crowley

"Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people."
— Aleister Crowley

"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness."
— Aleister Crowley

"Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales."
— Aleister Crowley

"Your kiss is bitter with cocaine."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

""She knew that she belonged to this man, body and soul. Every trace of shame departed; it was burnt out by the fire that consumed her. She gave him a thousand opportunities; she fought to turn his words to serious things. He baffled her with his shallow smile and ready tongue, that twisted all topics to triviality. By six o'clock she was morally on her knees before him; she was imploring him to stay to dinner with her. He refused.""
— Aleister Crowley (The Moonchild)

"For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect."
— Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law/Liber Al Vel Legis)

"Everyone interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstand you, or doesn't understand you at all."
— Aleister Crowley

"Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them..."
— Aleister Crowley (The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz)

"Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations"
— Aleister Crowley (The Book of Lies)

"People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"I've written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won't come."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them."
— Aleister Crowley (Magick in Theory and Practice)

"The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to Earth!"
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence."
— Aleister Crowley

"This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"Love is the law, love under will"
— Aleister Crowley

"In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless."
— Aleister Crowley

"I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over."
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)

"Every man and woman is a star."
— Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law/Liber Al Vel Legis)

"This is my real bed-rock objection to the eastern systems. They decry all manly virtue as dangerous and wicked, and they look upon Nature as evil. True enough, everything is evil relatively to Adonai; for all stain is impurity. A bee's swarm is evil — inside one's clothes. "Dirt is matter in the wrong place." It is dirt to connect sex with statuary, morals with art.
Only Adonai, who is in a sense the True Meaning of everything, cannot defile any idea. This is a hard saying, though true, for nothing of course is dirtier than to try and use Adonai as a fig-leaf for one's shame.
To seduce women under the pretense of religion is unutterable foulness; though both adultery and religion are themselves clean. To mix jam and mustard is a messy mistake."
— Aleister Crowley (Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary)

"Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life. "
— Aleister Crowley

"The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript."
— Aleister Crowley

"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."
— Aleister Crowley

"Nothing any man can do will improve that genius; but the genius needs his mind, and he can broaden that mind, fertilize it with knowledge of all kinds, improve its powers of expression; supply the genius, in short, with an orchestra instead of a tin whistle. All our little great men, our one-poem poets, our one-picture painters, have merely failed to perfect themselves as instruments. The Genius who wrote The Ancient Mariner is no less sublime than he who wrote The Tempest; but Coleridge had some incapacity to catch and express the thoughts of his genius - was ever such wooden stuff as his conscious work? - while Shakespeare had the knack of acquiring the knowledge necessary to the expression of every conceivable harmony, and his technique was sufficiently fluent to transcribe with ease."
— Aleister Crowley (The Moonchild)

"To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language."
— Aleister Crowley (Moonchild)

"The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels"
— Aleister Crowley (Diary of a Drug Fiend)