Aleister Crowley

“I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”

“May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall!”

“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...”

“Am I right in suggesting that ordinary life is a mean between these extremes, that the noble man devotes his material wealth to lofty ends, the advancement of science, or art, or some such t...”

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

“Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...”

“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.”

“Belief is the enemy of knowledge.”

“The planet Saturn, which represents anatomy, is the skeleton: It is a rigid structure upon which the rest of the body is built. To what moral qualities does this correspond? The first point...”

“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 t...”

“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”

“Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch...”

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

“I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”

“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...”

“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 mank...”

“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 o...”

“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”

“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”

“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”