Top 180 Aleister Crowley Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There are no “standards of Right”. Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with “moral principle”; there is no such thing.”

— Aleister Crowley

102. “I was not content to just believe in Satan. I wanted to be his chief or staff.”

— Aleister Crowley

103. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

118. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

130. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

132. “Fascism must always fail because it creates the discontent which it is designed to suppress.”

— Aleister Crowley

133. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

141. “If Osiris, Christ, and Mahomet were mad, then indeed is madness the key to the door of the Temple.”

— Aleister Crowley

142. “Sanity is a compromise.”

— Aleister Crowley

143. “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

144. “Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest.”

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

147. “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

148. “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

149. “To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention or submission, is entirely horrible, unnatural and absurd.”

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley