Aleister Crowley > Quotes

“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick: Book 4, Liber ABA

“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

“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, The Book of Lies

“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, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography

“The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick: Book 4, Liber ABA

“Every one 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 misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography

“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

“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

“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'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“Every man and every woman is a star.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law [Liber al vel Legis]

“What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy. ”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life....”
― Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography

“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, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography

“But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word "reason" already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable.

If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait's treatment of the long-suffering English language.

Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts.

It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is "absurd" to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be "impossible." You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way.

You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn.

This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. ”
― Aleister Crowley

“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, Moonchild

“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

“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

“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

“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]

“Happiness lies within oneself and the way to dig it out is cocaine-”
― Aleister Crowley

“It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law

“I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”
― Aleister Crowley

“It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“The Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law

“Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

“Love is the law, love under will.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law [Liber al vel Legis]

“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

“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

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography

“In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of "the common people," who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“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

“Your friends will notice at once that glib vacuities fail to impress, and hate you, and tell lies about you. It's worth it.”
― Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

“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

“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley : An Autohagiography

“Don't talk for five minutes, there's a good chap! I've a strange feeling come over me--almost as if I were going to think!”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“First of all, you must never speak of anything by its name -- in that country. So, if you see a tree on a mountain, it will be better to say 'Look at the green on the high'; for that's how they talk -- in that country. And whatever you do, you must find a false reason for doing it -- in that country. If you rob a man, you must say it is to help and protect him: that's the ethics -- of that country. And everything of value has no value at all -- in that country. You must be perfectly commonplace if you want to be a genius -- in that country. And everything you like you must pretend not to like; and anything that is there you must pretend is not there -- in that country. And you must always say that you are sacrificing yourself in the cause of religion, and morality, and humanity, and liberty, and progress, when you want to cheat your neighbour -- in that country."

Good heavens!" cried Iliel, 'are we going to England?”
― Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

“Since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Vision and the Voice: With Commentary and Other Papers

“For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law [Liber al vel Legis]

“The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General
at the expense of the Particular, quoth FRATER
PERDURABO, and laughed.
But those disciples nearest to him wept, seeing the
Universal Sorrow.
Those next to them laughed, seeing the Universal Joke.
Below these certain disciples wept,
Then certain laughed.
Others next wept.
Others next laughed.
Next others wept.
Next others laughed.
Last came those that wept because they could not
see the Joke, and those that laughed lest they
should be thought not to see the Joke, and thought
it safe to act like FRATER PERDURABO.
But though FRATER PERDURABO laughed
openly, He also at the same time wept secretly;
and in Himself He neither laughed nor wept.
Nor did He mean what He said.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

“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

“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