Aleister Crowley quotes
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“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 -
“The key of joy is disobedience.”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley, “Hymn To Lucifer”
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“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.”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley (1975). “The Commentaries of AL: Being the Equinox Volume V, No. 1”, Weiser Books
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“We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Sex is the sacred song of the soul; Sex is the sanctuary of Self.”
-- 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 CrowleySource : Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth Clement Lindsay, Peter Vergo (1994). “Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art”
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“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 -
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“I have been accused of being a ‘black magician.’ No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it.”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : "Man Ray: Photographer". Interview with Philippe Sers, Camera Magazine, 1981.
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“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 -
“Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley (1991). “Magick: In Theory and Practice”, Book Sales
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“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.”
-- 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 CrowleySource : "The Book of Lies". Book by Aleister Crowley, 1913.
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“The customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in all is the seal of unity.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
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“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 -
“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 CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley (2010). “The Diary of a Drug Fiend”, p.250, Weiser Books
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“Dreams are imperfections of sleep; even so is consciousness the imperfection of waking. Dreams are impurities in the circulation of the blood; even so it's consciousness a disorder of life. Dreams are without proportion, without good sense, without truth; so also is consciousness. Awake from dream, the truth is known: awake from waking. The truth is: The Unknown”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“The Holy Guardian Angel is the spiritual Sun of the Soul of the Adept.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“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 -
“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early!”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“The greatest, like Rembrandt, paint a gallant, a hag, and a carcass with equal passion and rapture; they love the truth as it is. Â They do not admit that anything can be ugly or evil; its existence justifies itself. Â This is because they know themselves to be part of an harmonious unity; to disdain any item of it would be to blaspheme the whole. Â The Thelemite is able to revel in any experience soever; in each he recognizes the tokens of ultimate Truth. Â It is surely obvious, even intellectually, that all phenomena are interdependent, and therefore involve each other.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“What is the meaning of Initiation? It is the Path to the realisation of your Self as the sole, the supreme, the absolute of all Truth, Beauty, Purity, Perfection!”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
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“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to Earth!”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
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“We place no reliance On virgin or pigeon; Our Method is Science, Our Aim is Religion.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“One must find out for oneself, and make sure beyond doubt, 'who' one is, 'what' one is, 'why' one is... Being thus conscious of the proper course to pursue, the next thing is to understand the conditions necessary to following it out. After that, one must eliminate from oneself every element alien or hostile to success, and develop those parts of oneself which are specially needed to control the aforesaid conditions.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“Invoke often! Inflame thyself with prayer!”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“You can only accomplish your object in life by complete disregard of the opinions of other people.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Stone of the Philosophers - by whatever name we choose to call the Great Work - is therefore endless. Success only opens up new avenues of brilliant possibility. Yea, verily, and Amen! the task is tireless and its joys without bounds; for the whole Universe, and all that in it is, what is it but the infinite playground of the Crowned and Conquering Child, of the insatiable, the innocent, the ever-rejoicing Heir of Space and Eternity, whose name is MAN?”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“The people who have really made history are the martyrs.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 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.”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley (1991). “Magick: In Theory and Practice”, Book Sales
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“Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley (2014). “Magick in Theory and Practice”, p.70, Lulu Press, Inc
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“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 -
“Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations”
-- Aleister CrowleySource : Aleister Crowley (1986). “Book of Lies”, Weiser Books
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“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 -
“She knew that she belonged to this man, body and soul. Every trace of shame departed; it was burnt out by the fire that consumed her. She gave him a thousand opportunities; she fought to turn his words to serious things. He baffled her with his shallow smile and ready tongue, that twisted all topics to triviality. By six o'clock she was morally on her knees before him; she was imploring him to stay to dinner with her. He refused.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“What is it in absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally distinct from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“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.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Their false compassion is called compassion and their false understanding is called understanding, for this is their most potent spell.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“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 -
“What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops an does naught. 31. If power asks why, then power is weakness.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“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!”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“The priestess of Artemis took hold of her almost with the violence of a lover, and whisked her away into a languid ecstasy of reverie. She communicated her own enthusiasm to the girl, and kept her mind occupied with dreams, faery-fervid, of uncharted seas of glory on which her galleon might sail, undiscovered countries of spice and sweetness, Eldorado and Utopia and the City of God.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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“The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“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 -
“He shall fall down into a pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of reason.”
-- Aleister Crowley -
“Genuine recollections almost invariably explain oneself to oneself. Suppose, for example, that you feel an instinctive aversion to some particular kind of wine. Try as you will, you can find no reason for it. Suppose when you explore a previous incarnation, you remember you died by a poisoned administered in a wine of that kind, your aversion is explained by the proverb: 'A burnt child dreads the fire.'”
-- Aleister Crowley -
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