1875-1947, British Occultist
Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say ''no.'' I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible.
Aleister Crowley – [Destiny]
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Aleister Crowley – [Free Will]
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
Aleister Crowley – [Lies and Lying]
I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.
Aleister Crowley – [Universe]
I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
Aleister Crowley – [School]
If one had to worry about one's actions in respect of other people's ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.
Aleister Crowley – [People, Other]
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 – [Magic]
Intolerance is evidence of impotence.
Aleister Crowley – [Intolerance]
It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.
Aleister Crowley – [Nuclear Age]
Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not.
Aleister Crowley – [Romance and Romanticism]
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.
Aleister Crowley – [Love]
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 – [Morality]
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
Aleister Crowley – [Morality]
Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.
Aleister Crowley – [Persuasion]
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 – [Heresy]
The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.
Aleister Crowley – [Doctrine]
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 – [Life and Living]
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
Aleister Crowley – [Mountains]
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
Aleister Crowley – [Martyrdom]
The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
Aleister Crowley – [Evil]