Top 180 Aleister Crowley Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Chinese civilisation is so systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.”

— Aleister Crowley

153. “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

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

— Aleister Crowley

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

— Aleister Crowley

156. “Do not imagine that art or anything else is other than high magic! – is a system of holy hieroglyph. The artist, the initiate, thus frames his mysteries. The rest of the world scoff, or seek to understand, or pretend to understand; some few obtain the truth.”

— Aleister Crowley

157. “In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.”

— Aleister Crowley

158. “It is a sort of sinister warning that there is some person or some thing in the Universe outside oneself: and the realisation of that is as frankly frightening as the other realisation, that one is eternally alone, is horrible.”

— Aleister Crowley

159. “When we’ve all finished talking, there’s something that never utters a word, but goes right down through the earth, plumb to the centre.”

— Aleister Crowley

160. “It is as if the first diviner of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent upon a combination of sacred drugs which should cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul.”

— Aleister Crowley

161. “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

162. “And allow me again to assure you that when you’ve got yourself going, doing your True Will, you won’t find you have any time to get bored.”

— Aleister Crowley

163. “When one walks, one is brought into touch first of all with the essential relations between one’s physical powers and the character of the country; one is compelled to see it as its natives do. Then every man one meets is an individual.”

— Aleister Crowley

164. “The Sorcerer may be – indeed he usually is – a thwarted disappointed man whose aims are perfectly natural. Often enough, his real trouble is ignorance; and by the time he has become fairly hot stuff as a Black Magician, he has learnt that he is getting nowhere, and finds himself, despite himself, on the True Path of the Wise.”

— Aleister Crowley

165. “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

166. “Look at the testimony of literature. In the days of chivalry our sympathies go with the Knight-errant, who redresses wrongs; with the King, whose courage and wisdom deliver his people from their enemies. But when Kingship became tyranny, and feudalism oppression, we took our heroes from the rebels. Robin Hood, Hereward the Wake, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Rob Roy; it was always the Under Dog that appealed to the artist.”

— Aleister Crowley

167. “I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn’t quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There aren’t such things. Every 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

168. “The man of earth is the adherent. The lover giveth his life unto the work among men. The hermit goeth solitary, and giveth only of his light unto men.”

— Aleister Crowley

169. “Early to bed and early to rise Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise: But late to watch and early to pray Brings him across The Abyss, they say.”

— Aleister Crowley

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Until you’ve got your mouth full of cocaine, you don’t know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You’re on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.”

— Aleister Crowley

173. “But to understand English is one thing; to understand an Englishman who talks is another.”

— Aleister Crowley

174. “I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.”

— Aleister Crowley

175. “The True Will is thus both determined by its equations, and free because those equation are simply its own name, spelt out fully.”

— Aleister Crowley

176. “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

177. “All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself.”

— Aleister Crowley

178. “Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.”

— Aleister Crowley

179. “Her cheeks were bright with a soft vermilion of the pomegranate mingling with the whiteness of the lily.”

— Aleister Crowley

180. “To argue:... “only causes us to fall into the pit of Because, and there to perish with the dogs of Reason.”

— Aleister Crowley

181. “There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.”

— Aleister Crowley

182. “All this is true and false; and it is true and false to say that it is true and false.”

— Aleister Crowley

183. “If I were a dog,′ he said to me once, ‘I should bark. If I were an owl, I should hoot. There’s nothing in either which is good or bad in itself. The only question is, what is the natural gesture?’ He thinks it his mission in the world to establish this Law of Thelema.” She saw my puzzled look. ” ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,‘” she quoted merrily. “You must have heard those words before!”

— Aleister Crowley

184. “Shallow thinkers always seem to be obsessed by the stupidity that if anything is a shadow, dream, illusion, it ceases to exist.”

— Aleister Crowley

185. “The mystic’s idea of deliberately stupefying and stultifying himself is an “abomination unto the Lord.” This, by the way, does not conflict with the rules of Yoga. That kind of suppression is comparable to the restrictions in athletic training, or diet in sickness.”

— Aleister Crowley

186. “We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.”

— Aleister Crowley

187. “The proper formation and consecration of the Eucharist requires careful attention. The Objects of the Working must be chosen systematically. My own Record has all the faults of pioneer work: it contains much to avoid. There must be proper tabulation of the Experiments, and strictly scientific observation. Sentimentality, sexual or spiritual, must be sternly suppressed. Compliance with these conventions should assure a success far greater than I have myself attained.”

— Aleister Crowley

188. “Time and Space are Adverbs.”

— Aleister Crowley

189. “Thoughts are false.”

— Aleister Crowley

190. “In brief, we govern by a mixture of lying and bullying.”

— Aleister Crowley