Aleister Crowley Quotes

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

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

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.

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.

Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...

One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.

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

Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.

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.

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!

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,
Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine

The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.

I do not think we were afraid of death; life had become such an infinitely boring alternation between a period of stimulation which failed to stimulate and of depression which hardly even depressed.