Aleister Crowley quotes

Aleister Crowley was a British occultist, writer, and ceremonial magician, regarded as a highly influential figure in modern esotericism. Famous for founding the religion of Thelema, his works combined mysticism, magic, and alternative spirituality. He remains a controversial figure, often celebrated for his innovations and criticized for his provocative lifestyle. Here are 182 of his quotes:

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

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

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

Every man and every woman is a star.

Aleister Crowley

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

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

Love is the law, love under will.

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

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

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

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Aleister Crowley

The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.

Aleister Crowley

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

Aleister Crowley

Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.

Aleister Crowley

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 customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so.

Aleister Crowley

I am inclined to agree with the Head Master of Eton that pæderastic passions among schoolboys 'do no harm'; further, I think them the only redeeming feature of sexual life at public schools.

Aleister Crowley

I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA .

Aleister Crowley

I believe in one secret and ineffable Lord; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name Chaos, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes. And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name Babalon.

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