Top 198 Quotes & Sayings by Aleister Crowley - Page 4

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called?

A madhouse of frenzied moneymaking and frenzied pleasure-seeking, with none of the corners chipped off. It is beautifully situatedand the air reminds one curiously of Edinburgh.

The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.

Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not.

Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm, and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point. The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.

Adaptation to one's environment makes for a sort of survival; but after all, the supreme victory is only won by those who prove themselves of so much hardier stuff than the rest that no power on earth is able to destroy them. The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

The True Will is thus both determined by its equations, and free because those equation are simply its own name, spelt out fully.

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!

The word of Sin is Restriction

Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding.

This formula of Love is universal; all the laws of Nature are its servitors. Thus, gravitation, chemical affinity, electrical potential, and the rest - and these are alike mere aspects of the general law - are so many differently-observed statements of the unique tendency.

30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops an does naught. 31. If power asks why, then power is weakness.

We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.

There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.

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.

This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.

Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.

The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.