Top 198 Quotes & Sayings by Aleister Crowley

Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

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.

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.

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

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.

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.

I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.

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.

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.

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

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.

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.

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.

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.

The customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so

May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early!

This Universe is a wild revel of atoms, men, and stars, each one a Soul of Light and Mirth, horsed on Eternity.

The Devil' is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes... 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. He is 'The Devil' of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection... He is therefore Life, and Love.

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.

The Gods are but names for the forces of Nature themselves.

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.

Magic is real. And reality... it is magical.

My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings.

Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.

It will be seen that the formula - 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' has nothing to do with 'Do as you please.' It is much more difficult to comply with the Law of Thelema than to follow out slavishly a set of dead regulations.

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.

The key of joy is disobedience.

It is necessary that we stop, once for all, this ignorant meddling with other people's business. Each individual must be left free to follow his own path.

You can only accomplish your object in life by complete disregard of the opinions of other people.

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

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.

Tell the truth, but lead so improbable a life that the truth will never be believed.

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.

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.

We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.

Sanity is a compromise.

Sex is the sacred song of the soul; Sex is the sanctuary of Self.

A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.

There is no grace: there is no guilt: This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!

Love is the only principle which makes life tolerable.

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.

Repeal all laws which assume that mankind is a herd of cattle

It's no good trying to teach people who need to be taught.

Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.

Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.

The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without.

It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.