Quotes by Aleister Crowley

No recorded vision is perfect, of high visions, for the seer must keep either his physical organs or his memory in working order. And neither is capable. There is no bridge. One can only be conscious of one thing at a time, and as the consciousness moves nearer to the vision, it loses control of the physical and mental.

Must not understanding lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars? (6:2)

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; fewer still take the trouble to enquire. We calmly, we carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that there should be misunderstandings!The fact is (again!) that usually we dont really want to know; it is so very much easier to drift down the river of discourse, lazily, lazily, drowsily, drowsily, In the noonday sun.Why is this so satisfactory? Because although we may not know what a word means, most words have a pleasant or unpleasant connotation, each for himself, either because of the ideas or images thus begotten, of hopes or memories stirred up, or merely for the sound of the word itself.

I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadnt quite enough sense to know that what I really wanted was human companions. There arent 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.

This is my real bed-rock objection to the eastern systems. They decry all manly virtue as dangerous and wicked, and they look upon Nature as evil. True enough, everything is evil relatively to Adonai; for all stain is impurity. A bees swarm is evil — inside ones clothes. Dirt is matter in the wrong place. It is dirt to connect sex with statuary, morals with art.Only Adonai, who is in a sense the True Meaning of everything, cannot defile any idea. This is a hard saying, though true, for nothing of course is dirtier than to try and use Adonai as a fig-leaf for ones shame.To seduce women under the pretense of religion is unutterable foulness; though both adultery and religion are themselves clean. To mix jam and mustard is a messy mistake.

Light, Life and Love are like three glow-worms at thy feet: the whole universe of stars, the dewdrops on the grass whereon thou walkest!

The keystone… some have called God, some Brahma, some Zeus… some even IAO… but in truth, O seeker, it is Thy-SELF.

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.

The Victrola, the Movies, a lecture: such are the three American alternatives to Silence, Scandal and Squabble.Or else, get drunk. America knows no other devices to enable its inhabitants to endure either their own company or that of their fellow-creatures.

But neither Europe nor Africa can show any such desolation as America. The proudest, stubbornest, bitterest peasant of deserted Spain, the most primitive and superstitious Arab of the remotest oases, are a little more than kin and never less than kind at their worst; whereas in the United States one is almost always conscious of an instinctive lack of sympathy and understanding with even the most charming and cultured people.

There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.Love is the law, love under will.

So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world with senseless clamour. Mechanize everything! Give nobody a chance to think. Standardize amusement. The louder and more cacophonous, the better! Brief intervals between one din and the next can be filled with appeals, repeated till hypnotic power gives them the force of orders, to buy this or that product of the Business men who are the real power in the State. Men who betray their country as obvious routine.The history of the past thirty years is eloquent enough, one would think. What these sodden imbeciles never realize is that a living organism must adapt itself intelligently to its environment, or go under at the first serious change of circumstance.

Love in a night shall live and die,Love in a day shall wing and fly;Love in the Spring shall last an hour,Easily fade a spring-tide flower.

...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

Those, therefore, who effect to despise profane Science are themselves despicable. It is their own incapacity for true Thought of any serious kind, their vanity and pertness; nay more also! their own subconsciousness sense of their own shame and idleness, that induces them to build these flimsy fortification of pretentious ignorance.

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

...the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention.

For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

Thou hast no right but to do thy will... For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.