Aleister Crowley > Quotes

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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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: Liber ABA: Book 4

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth

“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 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, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“Every man and every woman is a star.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“Love is the law, love under will.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

“We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.”
― Aleister Crowley

“Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.”
― 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

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

“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

“Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.”
― Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

“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

“For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”
― Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

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