Aleister Crowley
born
Edward Alexander Crowley
12th October 1875 - 1st December 1947
British Occultist, Writer, Philosopher, Hedonist.
Wiki
Member of
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
The Silver Star and
Ordo Templi Orientis
The Wickedest Man in the World
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”
“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.”
“If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Intolerance is evidence of impotence.”
“Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another”
“I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.”
“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”
“I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.”
“In the absence of will-power the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
“every man and woman is a star”
“The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell.”
“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.”
“The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.”
“The people who have really made history are the martyrs.”
“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.”
“To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.”
“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.”
“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
“Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all. A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honorable to which a man can be called?”
“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.”
“When one walks, one is brought into touch first of all with the essential relations between one's physical powers and the character of the country; one is compelled to see it as its natives do. Then every man one meets is an individual. One is no longer regarded by the whole population as an unapproachable and uninteresting animal to be cheated and robbed.”
“I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.”
“Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas --stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety.”