Quotes from Aleister Crowley

doubt is a good servant but a bad master; a perfect mistress, but a nagging wife.

I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these two goats [Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard].

Do you remember what it says in The Book of the Law ? 'I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge and Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.' Yes, I said slowly, and I thought it a bit daring; might tempt people to be foolhardy, don't you think? Of course, agreed Basil, if you read it carelessly.

Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adeptship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois virtues which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.

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

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!

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.

There is no bond that can unite the divided but love.

You must on no account attempt to use the squares given in the Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage until you have succeeded in the Operation. More, unless you mean to perform it, and are prepared to go to any length to do so, you are a fool to have the book in your possession at all. Those squares are liable to get loose and do things on their own initiative; and you won't like it.

the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul.

He is in me, and I in Him! Mine is the crystal radiance That filleth æther to the brim Wherein all stars and suns may dance. I am the beautiful and glad, Rejoicing in the golden day.

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

What do I mean when I say that I think I was Eliphaz Lévi ? No more than that I possess some of his most essential characteristics, and that some of the incidents in his life are remembered by me as my own. There doesn't seem any impossibility about these bundles of Sankhara being shared by two or more persons. We certainly do not know enough of what actually takes place to speak positively on any such point. Don't lose any sleep over it.

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.

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.

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.

The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.

For true Magick means to employ one set of natural forces at a mechanical advantage as against another set—I quote, as closely as memory serves, Thomas Henry Huxley , when he explains that when he lifts his water-jug—or his elbow—he does not defy the Law of Gravitation. On the contrary, he uses that Law; its equations form part of the system by which he lifts the jug without spilling the water.

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.

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

They made figures of brass, and tried to induce souls to indwell them. In some accounts we read that they succeeded; Friar Bacon was credited with one such Homunculus; so was Albertus Magnus, and, I think, Paracelsus. He had, at least, a devil in his long sword 'which taught him all the cunning pranks of past and future mountebanks

But this is a general objection of the sceptical sort to all miracles of whatever kind, and leadeth anon into the quagmire of arguments about Free Will. The Adept will do better to rely upon The Book of the Law , which urgeth constantly to action. Even rash action is better than none, by that Light; let the Magician then argue that his folly is part of the natural order which worketh all so well. — Liber DCXXXIII De Thaumaturgia

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.

In vain we labour at the loathsome task Not knowing if we wake or sleep ; But in the end we lift the plumèd casque Of the dead warrior ; Find no chaste corpse therein, but a soft-smiling whore.