Aleister Crowley Quotes

“It is impossible to understand Crowley. unless we grasp that, like Madame Blavatsky and Mathers and Yeats and Florence Farr, he took magic as seriously as Lord Rutherford took atomic physics. Literarym commentators often make the same mistake about Yeats: that he regarded magic as a romantic exercise in suspension of disbelief. Yeat's [sic] magical notebooks reveal this to have been untrue; they go into overwhelming detail about magical procedures and symbols and show that he continued to be obsessed by it long after he ceased to be a member of the Golden Dawn.”
― Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast

“The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority the resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists at an abstraction.”
― Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast