Aleister Crowley Quotes

The Devil' is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes... This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade 'Know Thyself!' and taught Initiation. He is 'The Devil' of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection... He is therefore Life, and Love.

There is no grace: there is no guilt: This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!

You can only accomplish your object in life by complete disregard of the opinions of other people.

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

The key of joy is disobedience.

Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.

Magic is real. And reality... it is magical.

It is necessary that we stop, once for all, this ignorant meddling with other people's business. Each individual must be left free to follow his own path.

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.

Sanity is a compromise.

People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.

We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.

Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles.

Repeal all laws which assume that mankind is a herd of cattle

Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become 'one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions': a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have --- Greatness.

Sex is the sacred song of the soul; Sex is the sanctuary of Self.

It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.

I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Christ of the people whom I hated.

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

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.

To train the mind to move with the maximum speed and energy, with the utmost possible accuracy in the chosen direction, and with the minimum of disturbance or friction. That is Magick. To stop the mind altogether. That is Yoga.

My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know, and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such beings.

The Gods are but names for the forces of Nature themselves.

I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.