“…the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.”
— Aleister Crowley
“Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But–on the top of that–he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it.”
— Aleister Crowley
“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.”
— Aleister Crowley
“Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest”
— 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
“First of all, you must never speak of anything by its name — in that country. So, if you see a tree on a mountain, it will be better to say ‘Look at the green on the high’; for that’s how they talk — in that country. And whatever you do, you must find a false reason for doing it — in that country. If you rob a man, you must say it is to help and protect him: that’s the ethics — of that country. And everything of value has no value at all — in that country. You must be perfectly commonplace if you want to be a genius — in that country. And everything you like you must pretend not to like; and anything that is there you must pretend is not there — in that country. And you must always say that you are sacrificing yourself in the cause of religion, and morality, and humanity, and liberty, and progress, when you want to cheat your neighbour — in that country.”Good heavens!” cried Iliel, ‘are we going to England?”
— Aleister Crowley
“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 seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, ”Of couse I am – sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.”
— Aleister Crowley
“Woe to that seven months abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a wall in China!”
— Aleister Crowley
“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.”
— Aleister Crowley
“Belief is the enemy of knowledge.”
— Aleister Crowley
“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously but to take it seriously one must be already mad.”
— Aleister Crowley
“Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them…”
— Aleister Crowley
“A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.”
— Aleister Crowley
“Am I right in suggesting that ordinary life is a mean between these extremes, that the noble man devotes his material wealth to lofty ends, the advancement of science, or art, or some such true ideal; and that the base man does the opposite by concentrating all his abilities on the amassing of wealth?’Exactly; that is the real distinction between the artist and the bourgeois, or, if you prefer it, between the gentleman and the cad. Money, and the things money can buy, have no value, for there is no question of creation, but only of exchange. Houses, lands, gold, jewels, even existing works of art, may be tossed about from one hand to another; they are so, constantly. But neither you nor I can write a sonnet; and what we have, our appreciation of art, we did not buy. We inherited the germ of it, and we developed it by the sweat of our brows. The possession of money helped us, but only by giving us time and opportunity and the means of travel. Anyhow, the principle is clear; one must sacrifice the lower to the higher, and, as the Greeks did with their oxen, one must fatten and bedeck the lower, so that it may be the worthier offering.”
— Aleister Crowley
“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
“But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connexion of things, if only because our use of the word “reason” already implies the idea of causal connexion. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connexion was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable.If you cut off a man’s head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centres, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait’s treatment of the long-suffering English language.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.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.You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn.This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley.”
— 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
“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
“I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”
— 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
“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
– 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 people who have really made history are the martyrs.”
– Aleister Crowley
“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.”
– 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
“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
“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