Aleister Crowley Quotes

Light, Life and Love are like three glow-worms at thy feet: the whole universe of stars, the dewdrops on the grass whereon thou walkest!

~ Aleister Crowley

The keystone… some have called God, some Brahma, some Zeus… some even IAO… but in truth, O seeker, it is Thy-SELF.

~ Aleister Crowley

On the Path of the Wise there is probably no danger more deadly, no poison more pernicious, no seduction more subtle than Spiritual Pride; it strikes, being solar, at the very heart of the Aspirant; more, it is an inflation and exacerbation of the Ego, so that its victim runs the peril of straying into a Black Lodge, and finding himself at home there.

~ Aleister Crowley

Remember all ye that existence is pure joy, that all the sorrows are but as shadows, they pass & are done, but there is that which remains.

~ Aleister Crowley

The Victrola, the Movies, a lecture: such are the three American alternatives to Silence, Scandal and Squabble.Or else, get drunk. America knows no other devices to enable its inhabitants to endure either their own company or that of their fellow-creatures.

~ Aleister Crowley

But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.

~ Aleister Crowley

There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.Love is the law, love under will.

~ Aleister Crowley

So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give nobody a chance to think. Standardize amusement. The louder and more cacophonous, the better! Brief intervals between one din and the next can be filled with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them the force of orders, to buy this or that product of the Business men who are the real power in the State. Men who betray their country as obvious routine.The history of the past thirty years is eloquent enough, one would think. What these sodden imbeciles never realize is that a living organism must adapt itself intelligently to its environment, or go under at the first serious change of circumstance.

~ Aleister Crowley

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

But to understand English is one thing, to understand an Englishman who talks is another.

~ Aleister Crowley

...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

~ Aleister Crowley

Those, therefore, who effect to despise profane Science are themselves despicable. It is their own incapacity for true Thought of any serious kind, their vanity and pertness; nay more also! their own subconsciousness sense of their own shame and idleness, that induces them to build these flimsy fortification of pretentious ignorance.

~ Aleister Crowley

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

~ Aleister Crowley

...the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention.

~ Aleister Crowley

For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

~ Aleister Crowley

Thou hast no right but to do thy will... For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

~ Aleister Crowley

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of performing these small ceremonies regularly, and being as nearly accurate as possible with regard to the times. You must not mind stopping in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare—lorries or no lorries—and saying the Adorations; and you must not mind snubbing your guest—or your host—if he or she should prove ignorant of his or her share of the dialogue. It is perhaps because these matters are so petty and trivial in appearance that they afford so excellent a training. They teach you concentration, mindfulness, moral and social courage, and a host of other virtues.

~ Aleister Crowley

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

She it is, she, that found meIn the morphia honeymoon;With silk and steel she bound meIn her poisonous milk she drowned me,Even now her arms surround me

~ Aleister Crowley

Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.

~ Aleister Crowley

...we have no right to decide off-hand that it is an unnatural pleasure to eat sawdust. A man might be constituted so that he liked it. And so long as his peculiarity doesn't damage or interfere with other people, there's no reason why he shouldn't be left alone.But if it is the man's fixed belief that sawdust eating is essential to human happiness; if he attributes almost everything that happens either to the effects of eating it or not eating it; if he imagines that most of the people he meets are also sawdust-eaters, and above all, if he thinks that the salvation of the world depends entirely upon making laws to compel people to eat sawdust, whether they like it or not, then it is fair to say that his mind is unbalanced on the subject; and that, further, the practice itself, however innocent it may appear, is in that particular case perverse. Sanity consists in the proper equilibrium of ideas in general. That is the only sense in which it is true that genius is connected with insanity.

~ Aleister Crowley

Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adeptship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois virtues which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.

~ Aleister Crowley

The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's!

~ Aleister Crowley

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

... it was once necessary to proclaim the entire doctrine of Yoga in the fewest possible words.... I did so.“Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!”The first two of these instructions comprise the whole of the technique of Yoga. The last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to expound in this present elementary stage.

~ Aleister Crowley

The mystic's idea of deliberately stupefying and stultifying himself is an abomination unto the Lord. This, by the way, does not conflict with the rules of Yoga. That kind of suppression is comparable to the restrictions in athletic training, or diet in sickness.

~ Aleister Crowley

All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.

~ Aleister Crowley

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

I cling unto the burning Æthyr like Lucifer that fell through the Abyss, and by the fury of his flight kindled the air. And I am Belial, for having seen the Rose upon thy breast, I have denied God.And I am Satan! I am Satan! I am cast out upon a burning crag! And the sea boils about the desolation thereof. And already the vultures gather, and feast upon my flesh.

~ Aleister Crowley

So sweet is this song that no one could resist it. For in it is all the passionate ache for the moonlight, and the great hunger of the sea, and the terror of desolate places,—all things that lure men to the unattainable.Omari tessala marax,tessala dodi phornepaxamri radara poliaxarmana piliuamri radara piliu son;mari narya barbitonmadara anaphax sarpedonandala hriliuTranslation:I am the harlot that shaketh Death.This shaking giveth the Peace of Satiate Lust.Immortality jetteth from my skull,And music from my vulva.Immortality jetteth from my vulva also,For my Whoredom is a sweet scent like a seven-stringed instrument,Played unto God the Invisible, the all-ruler,That goeth along giving the shrill scream of orgasm.Every man that hath seen me forgetteth me never, and I appear oftentimes in the coals of the fire, and upon the smooth white skin of woman, and in the constancy of the waterfall, and in the emptiness of deserts and marshes, and upon great cliffs that look seaward; and in many strange places, where men seek me not. And many thousand times he beholdeth me not. And at last I smite myself into him as a vision smiteth into a stone, and whom I call must follow.

~ Aleister Crowley

Now there is naught but a vast black triangle having the apex downwards, and in the centre of the black triangle is the face of Typhon, the Lord of the Tempest, and he crieth aloud: Despair! Despair! For thou mayest deceive the Virgin, and thou mayest cajole the Mother; but what wilt thou say unto the ancient Whore that is throned in Eternity? For if she will not, there is neither force nor cunning, nor any wit, that may prevail upon her.Thou canst not woo her with love, for she is love. And she hath all, and hath no need of thee. And thou canst not woo her with gold, for all the Kings and captains of the earth, and all the gods of heaven, have showered their gold upon her. Thus hath she all, and hath no need of thee. And thou canst not woo her with knowledge, for knowledge is the thing that she hath spurned. She hath it all, and hath no need of thee. And thou canst not woo her with wit, for her Lord is Wit. She hath it all, and hath no need of thee. Despair! Despair!Nor canst thou cling to her knees and ask for pity; nor canst thou cling to her heart and ask for love; nor canst thou put thine arms about her neck, and ask for understanding; for thou hast all these, and they avail thee not. Despair! Despair! Then I took the Flaming Sword, and I let it loose against Typhon, so that his head was cloven asunder, and the black triangle dissolved in lightnings.

~ Aleister Crowley

Verily, I say unto thee, many are the adepts that have looked upon the back parts of my father, and cried, our eyes fail before the glory of thy countenance.

~ Aleister Crowley

The seal of Reason, made impregnable:_ The seal of Truth, immeasurably splendid:The seal of Brotherhood, man's miracle:_ The seal of Peace, and Wisdom heaven-descended:The seal of Bitterness, cast down to Hell:_ The seal of Love, secure, not-to-be-rended:The seventh seal, Equality: that, broken,God sets His thunder and earthquake for a token.

~ Aleister Crowley

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

~ Aleister Crowley

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.

~ Aleister Crowley

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 people who have really made history are the martyrs.

~ Aleister Crowley

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

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

~ Aleister Crowley

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