Quotes from 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.

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

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

in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

Your friends will notice at once that glib vacuities fail to impress, and hate you, and tell lies about you. It's worth it.

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.

64. I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.

Since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.

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.

A single ego is an absurdly narrow vantage point from which to view the world.

This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.

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.

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!

A man friends are more capable of working him harm than strangers; and his greatest danger lies in his own habits.

The more necessary anything appears to my mind, the most certain it is that I only assert a limitation.

30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought. 31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.

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.

A red rose absorbs all colors but red; red is therefore the one color that it is not.

Their false compassion is called compassion and their false understanding is called understanding, for this is their most potent spell.

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.

A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.

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

This is the Night wherein I'm lost, the Love through which I am no longer

There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.