Top 100 Aleister Crowley Quotes
#1. This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade 'Know Thyself!' and taught Initiation.
Aleister Crowley
#2. Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfil it according to the law of light.
Aleister Crowley
#3. I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.
Aleister Crowley
#4. Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.
Aleister Crowley
#5. I was not content to just believe in Satan. I wanted to be his chief or staff.
Aleister Crowley
#6. 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
#7. Initiation means the Journey Inwards: nothing is changed or can be changed; but all is trulier understood with every step.
Aleister Crowley
#9. Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
Aleister Crowley
#10. To train the mind to move with the maximum speed and energy, with the utmost possible accuracy in the chosen direction, and with the minimum of disturbance or friction. That is Magick. To stop the mind altogether. That is Yoga.
Aleister Crowley
#11. 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
#12. Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.
Aleister Crowley
#13. Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)
Aleister Crowley
#14. 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
#15. I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
Aleister Crowley
#16. Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in all is the seal of unity.
Aleister Crowley
#18. There is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is, Garcon! Un Pernod!
Aleister Crowley
#19. Alas the Master; so he sinks in death. But whoso knows the mystery of man Sees life and death as curves of the same plan
Aleister Crowley
#20. I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.
Aleister Crowley
#21. We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.
Aleister Crowley
#22. The intention of this Book of The Law is perfectly simple. Whatever your sexual predilections may be, you are free, by the Law of Thelema, to the the star you are, to go your own way rejoicing.
Aleister Crowley
#23. This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.
Aleister Crowley
#24. 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
#25. It's no good trying to teach people who need to be taught.
Aleister Crowley
#26. Her cheeks were bright with a soft vermilion of the pomegranate mingling with the whiteness of the lily.
Aleister Crowley
#28. 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
#29. Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one's neighbor is superior to oneself.
Aleister Crowley
#30. This is the Night wherein I'm lost, the Love through which I am no longer
Aleister Crowley
#31. The word of sin is Restriction. O man! refuse not thy wife, if she will! O lover, if thou wilt, depart! There is no bond that can unite the divided but love: all else is a curse. Accursed! Accursed be it to the aeons! Hell.
Aleister Crowley
#32. I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul
Aleister Crowley
#33. There is no grace: there is no guilt: This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!
Aleister Crowley
#34. And allow me again to assure you that when you've got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won't find you have any time to get bored.
Aleister Crowley
#35. There are no "standards of Right". Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing.
Aleister Crowley
#36. This Universe is a wild revel of atoms, men, and stars, each one a Soul of Light and Mirth, horsed on Eternity.
Aleister Crowley
#37. One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.
Aleister Crowley
#38. The first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.
Aleister Crowley
#39. We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.
Aleister Crowley
#40. The Great Work is the uniting of opposites. It may mean the uniting of
the soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the female
with the male, of the ego with the non-ego - or what not.
Aleister Crowley
#41. The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it.
Aleister Crowley
#42. O Godhead of glory and anguish!
O Christ shone through Magdalen's tears!
Thy sons on the universe languish
In iron bands strong as the spheres;
With virtue Thy likeness we cover,
With priestcraft we mock at Thy power,
And the meanest on earth is a lover,
As vile as a flower.
Aleister Crowley
#43. Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest
Aleister Crowley
#44. Like clouds in rain, like seas
Exultant as they roll,
We mix in ecstasies,
And, as breeze melts in breeze,
Thy soul becomes my soul.
Aleister Crowley
#45. Black magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results - of an extremely temporary nature.
Aleister Crowley
#46. And this is the mystery that I declare unto thee: that from the Crown itself spring the three great delusions; Aleph is madness, and Beth is falsehood, and Gimel is glamour.
- The Cry of the 3rd Aethyr Which Is Called ZON
Aleister Crowley
#47. Every incarnation that we remember must increase our comprehension of ourselves as who we are.
Aleister Crowley
#48. To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Aleister Crowley
#50. I saw at once the way to appeal to him.. 'Well, of course you know.' I said, 'in really smart circles one has to offer heroin and cocaine to people. It's only a passing fashion, of course, but while it's on, one's really out of it if one doesn't do the right thing.
Aleister Crowley
#51. The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
Aleister Crowley
#52. All this talk about 'suffering humanity' is principally drivel based on the error of transferring one's own psychology to one's neighbour. The Golden Rule is silly. If Lord Alfred Douglas (for example) did to others what he would like them to do to him, many would resent his action.
Aleister Crowley
#53. A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.
Aleister Crowley
#54. It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.
Aleister Crowley
#55. The sot drinks, and is drunken: the coward drinks not, and shivers: the wise man, brave and free, drinks, and gives glory to the Most High God.
Aleister Crowley
#56. I am inclined to agree with the Head Master of Eton that paederastic passions among schoolboys 'do no harm'; further, I think them the only redeeming feature of sexual life at public schools.
Aleister Crowley
#59. 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
#61. It is a sort of sinister warning that there is some person or some thing in the Universe outside oneself: and the realisation of that is as frankly frightening as the other realisation, that one is eternally alone, is horrible.
Aleister Crowley
#62. I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.
Aleister Crowley
#63. In the wind of the mind arises the turbulence called I.
It breaks; down shower the barren thoughts.
All life is choked.
This desert is the abyss wherein the Universe.
The Stars are but thistles in that waste.
Yet this desert is but one spot accursed in a world of bliss
Aleister Crowley
#66. For when all is equilibrated, when all is beheld from without all, there is joy, joy, joy that is but one facet of a diamond, every other facet whereof is more joyful than joy itself.
Aleister Crowley
#67. The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to Earth!
Aleister Crowley
#69. I've written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won't come.
Aleister Crowley
#71. What is necessary is not to seek after some fantastic ideal, utterly unsuited to our real needs, but to discover the true nature of those needs, to fulfill them, and rejoice therein.
Aleister Crowley
#72. The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.
Aleister Crowley
#73. A man friends are more capable of working him harm than strangers; and his greatest
danger lies in his own habits.
Aleister Crowley
#74. There is a single main definition of the object of all magical Ritual. It is the uniting of the Microcosm with the Macrocosm. The Supreme and Complete Ritual is therefore the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel; or, in the language of Mysticism, Union with God.
Aleister Crowley
#75. This is th' abyss. Behold wherein I lurk
The lazar-house my mind, wherein do work
The horrid charnel-priests, whose loathly song
Sickens my soul, and quells the spirit strong.
Aleister Crowley
#76. Love in a night shall live and die,
Love in a day shall wing and fly;
Love in the Spring shall last an hour,
Easily fade a spring-tide flower.
Aleister Crowley
#77. I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA .
Aleister Crowley
#78. Look not so deeply into words and letters; for this Mystery hath been hidden by the Alchemists. Compose the sevenfold into a fourfold regimen; and when thou hast understood thou mayest make symbols; but by playing child's games with symbols thou shalt never understand.
Aleister Crowley
#79. To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.
Aleister Crowley
#80. Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.
Aleister Crowley
#81. In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
Aleister Crowley
#82. We place no reliance On virgin or pigeon; Our Method is Science, Our Aim is Religion.
Aleister Crowley
#83. Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.
Aleister Crowley
#84. But to understand English is one thing; to understand an Englishman who talks is another.
Aleister Crowley
#85. The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.
Aleister Crowley
#86. We [of Thelema] are whole-hearted extroverts; the penalty of restricting oneself is anything from neurosis to down right lunacy; in particular, melancholia.
Aleister Crowley
#87. I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, 'Of couse I am - sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.
Aleister Crowley
#88. Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
Aleister Crowley
#89. Chaos is Peace ... Blackness, blackness intolerable, before the beginning of the light. This is the first verse of Genesis. Holy art thou, Chaos, Chaos, Eternity, all contradictions in terms!
Aleister Crowley
#90. A red rose absorbs all colors but red; red is therefore the one color that it is not.
Aleister Crowley
#91. There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.
Aleister Crowley
#93. The average man cannot believe that an artist may be as serious and highminded an observer of life as the professed man of science.
Aleister Crowley
#96. Do what thou wilt, the most sublimely austere ethical precept ever uttered, despite its apparent license.
Aleister Crowley
#97. All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself
Aleister Crowley
#98. The two seem, at first glance, to be opposed, but when you have advanced a little in both, you find that concentration learned in Yoga is of immense use in attaining the mental powers necessary in Magick; on the other hand, the discipline of Magick is of the greatest service in Yoga.
Aleister Crowley
#99. Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is our own fault if we go over the brink.
Aleister Crowley
#100. All that was ordered and stable is shaken. The Aeon of Wonders is come. Like locusts shall they gather themselves together, the servants of the Star and the Snake, and they shall eat up everything that is upon the earth. For why? Because the Lord of Righteousness delighteth in them. (16:6)
Aleister Crowley
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