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Aleister Crowley Quotes

Total quotes: 32
“Further, an excess of legislation defeats its own ends. It makes the whole population criminals, and turns them all into police and police spies. The moral health of such a people is ruined for ever; only revolution can save it.”
— Aleister Crowley, Cocaine: Impressions and Opinions
Tagged: Legislation, War on Drugs, Cocaine, Police, Revolution
“Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.”
— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
Tagged: Happiness, Cocaine
“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
Tagged: talking, Words, Waste, lying, Vow of Silence
“If you cut off a man's head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer.”
— Aleister Crowley, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law
Tagged: Decapitation, Painfully Obvious, Death
“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.”
— Aleister Crowley, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law
Tagged: Knowledge, Experience, Natural Law, Immanuel Kant, Huxley
“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
Tagged: atheism, Bible, Christianity, insane
“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
Tagged: Mastery, Misbehaving, Transcendence, Rules
“Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...”
— Aleister Crowley, The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz
Tagged: Sodomites, Sodomy, Greatness
“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Tagged: Virtue, Talent, willpower
“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.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Tagged: Joy, Life, Growth, Change
“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
Tagged: Experience, Empathy, Communication, Misunderstandings
“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
Tagged: Science, Magic, Magical, Wisdom, Cleverness
“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
Tagged: Projection, universal truth
“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, Magick Without Tears
Tagged: Friends, Vacuities, shallow
“The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the most certain it is that I only assert a limitation.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies
Tagged: Craving, Limitation
“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
Tagged: New Year's Resolution, Virtue, Irony
“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, 777 And Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley: Including Gematria & Sepher Sephiroth
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”
— Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
Tagged: Poetry, Lies, mother, Irony
“What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.”
— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
Tagged: heart, Grieving, separation
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Tagged: Reading, newspaper, Worthwhile
“Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.”
— Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend
Tagged: talking, Silence, antisocial, Solipsism, Vow of Silence
“Every man and every woman is a star.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law: Liber Al Vel Legis by Aleister Crowley(2004-03-01)
Tagged: Star, Man, Woman
“Love is the law, love under will.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Tagged: Love, Law, Will
“For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law
Tagged: Love, Divided, Union
“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, The Diary of a Drug Fiend
Tagged: Love, love affairs, Silly, Sordid, Pleasure, Blindness, Boredom, Disgust
“Do not imagine that art or anything else is other than high magic!—is a system of holy hieroglyph. The artist, the initiate, thus frames his mysteries. The rest of the world scoff, or seek to understand, or pretend to understand; some few obtain the truth.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Drug and Other Stories(Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)
Tagged: Art, Magic, Mysteries, Truth
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
— Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Tagged: Morality, Ordinary People, Elitism
“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, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Tagged: talking, Thinking, Cynicism, Weight, Pain, Doom, Weaeriness
“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, The Vision & the Voice
Tagged: Lucifer, Belial, God, satan, Vultures
“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.”
— Aleister Crowley, Magical and Philosophical Commentaries on The Book of the Law
Tagged: Rembrandt, Superstition, Absurd
“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, Moonchild
Tagged: Shame, Love, Lust, Possession, Rejection
“In Astrology, the moon, among its other meanings, has that of ‘the common people,’ who submit (they know not why) to any independent will that can express itself with sufficient energy. The people who guillotined the mild Louis XVI died gladly for Napoleon. The impossibility of an actual democracy is due to this fact of mob-psychology. As soon as you group men, they lose their personalities. A parliament of the wisest and strongest men in the nation is liable to behave like a set of schoolboys, tearing up their desks and throwing their inkpots at each other. The only possibility of co-operation lies in discipline and autocracy, which men have sometimes established in the name of equal rights.”
— Aleister Crowley, Moonchild
Tagged: Astrology, Napoleon, Louis XVI, Autocracy, equal rights
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