Top 180 Aleister Crowley Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.”

— Aleister Crowley

102. “I have been accused of being a ‘black magician.’ No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it.”

— Aleister Crowley

103. “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

104. “The average man cannot believe that an artist may be as serious and highminded an observer of life as the professed man of science.”

— Aleister Crowley

105. “The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without.”

— Aleister Crowley

106. “There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.”

— Aleister Crowley

107. “Alas the Master; so he sinks in death. But whoso knows the mystery of man Sees life and death as curves of the same plan.”

— Aleister Crowley

108. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

111. “How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes.”

— Aleister Crowley

112. “Ever man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease – that of thinking.”

— Aleister Crowley

113. “Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.”

— Aleister Crowley

114. “I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.”

— Aleister Crowley

115. “On the Path of the Wise there is probably no danger more deadly, no poison more pernicious, no seduction more subtle than Spiritual Pride; it strikes, being solar, at the very heart of the Aspirant; more, it is an inflation and exacerbation of the Ego, so that its victim runs the peril of straying into a Black Lodge, and finding himself at home there.”

— Aleister Crowley

116. “Every incarnation that we remember must increase our comprehension of ourselves as who we are.”

— Aleister Crowley

117. “The first condition of success in magick is purity of purpose.”

— Aleister Crowley

118. “Any act, if in accordance with the will, is an act of magic.”

— Aleister Crowley

119. “The sot drinks, and is drunken: the coward drinks not, and shivers: the wise man, brave and free, drinks, and gives glory to the Most High God.”

— Aleister Crowley

120. “The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.”

— Aleister Crowley

121. “Awake from dream, the truth is known: awake from waking. The truth is: The Unknown.”

— Aleister Crowley

122. “The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will.”

— Aleister Crowley

123. “I’ve written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won’t come.”

— Aleister Crowley

124. “I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”

— Aleister Crowley

125. “The early bird catches the worm and the twelve-year-old prostitute attracts the ambassador.”

— Aleister Crowley

126. “Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations.”

— Aleister Crowley

127. “The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one’s neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.”

— Aleister Crowley

128. “Love death therefore, and long eagerly for it. Die Daily.”

— Aleister Crowley

129. “The nails from a suicide’s coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.”

— Aleister Crowley

130. “Sanity is a compromise.”

— Aleister Crowley

131. “But every evil brings its own remedy. Another quality of Saturn is melancholy; Saturn represents the sorrow of the universe; it is the Trance of sorrow that has determined one to undertake the task of emancipation. This is the energizing force of Law; it is the rigidity of the fact that everything is sorrow which moves one to the task, and keeps one on the Path.”

— Aleister Crowley

132. “It is only necessary to destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man’s course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god.”

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

134. “There is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is, Garcon! Un Pernod!”

— Aleister Crowley

135. “Who hath the how is careless of the why.”

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

137. “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

138. “Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas – stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety.”

— Aleister Crowley

139. “Directly a man begins to say “Yes” without the question “Why?” he becomes a dogmatist, a potential, if not an actual liar.”

— Aleister Crowley

140. “A madhouse of frenzied moneymaking and frenzied pleasure-seeking, with none of the corners chipped off. It is beautifully situatedand the air reminds one curiously of Edinburgh.”

— Aleister Crowley

141. “The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.”

— Aleister Crowley

142. “All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.”

— Aleister Crowley

143. “The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it.”

— Aleister Crowley

144. “The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life’s throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun’s!”

— Aleister Crowley

145. “The Universe is the looking-glass of the soul.”

— Aleister Crowley

146. “For the first time in my life I was being absolutely myself, freed from all inhibitions of body, intellect and training... I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane and answering “Of course I am-sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.”

— Aleister Crowley

147. “Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.”

— Aleister Crowley

148. “Verily, love is death, and death is life to come.”

— Aleister Crowley

149. “If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.”

— Aleister Crowley

150. “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