Aleister Crowley Quotes
There is no part of me that is not of the gods!
Every man and every woman is a star.
Who hath the how is careless of the why.
I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.
The Many is as adorable to the One as the One is to the Many.
Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.
Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.
I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy.
It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.
Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad
For a woman does not carry in herself the principle of new life, except temporarily , when it is given her.
God is He whom we shall eternally learn to know better, and, consequently, He whom we shall never know entirely.
Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness
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 Way of Mastery is to break all the rules—but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this; otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them.
I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered — now I have only one doubt left — which of the twain was God?
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.
We of Thelema say that "Every man and every woman is a star." We do not fool and flatter women; we do not despise and abuse them. To us a woman is Herself, absolute, original, independent, free, selfjustified, exactly as a man is.
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.
It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.
So then a Woman advanceth never in Magick, but remaineth the same, rightly or wrongly ordered according to the Force that moveth Her. Here herefore is the Limit of Her Aspiration in Magick, to abide joyous and obedient beneath the Man that her Instinct shall divine so that by Habit becoming a Temple well-ordered, comely and consecrated, she may in her next Incarnation attract by her Fitness a Man-soul.
When a man becomes a magician he looks about him for a magical weapon; and, being probably endowed with that human frailty called laziness, he hopes to find a weapon ready made. Thus we find the Christian Magus who imposed his power upon the world taking the existing worships and making a single system combining all their merits. There is no single feature in Christianity which has not been taken bodily from the worship of Isis, or of Mithras, or of Bacchus, or of Adonis, or of Osiris. In modern times again we find Frater Iehi Aour trying to handle Buddhism. Others again have attempted to use Freemasonry. There have been even exceptionally foolish magicians who have tried to use a sword long since rusted.
We shall exhibit true religion with such characters, that no one, believer or unbeliever, can fail to recognize it; that will be the absolute in religion. We shall establish in philosophy the immutable characters of that Truth, which is in science, reality; in judgment, reason; and in ethics, justice. Finally, we shall acquaint you with the laws of Nature, whose equilibrium is stability, and we shall show how vain are the phantasies of our imagination before the fertile realities of movement and of life. We shall also invite the great poets of the future to create once more the divine comedy, no longer according to the dreams of man, but according to the mathematics of God.
Mysteries of other worlds, hidden forces, strange revelations, mysterious illnesses, exceptional faculties, spirits, apparitions, magical paradoxes, hermetic arcana, we shall say all, and we shall explain all. Who has given us this power? We do not fear to reveal it to our readers.
There exists an occult and sacred alphabet which the Hebrews attribute to Enoch, the Egyptians to Thoth or to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greeks to Cadmus and to Palamedes. This alphabet was known to the followers of Pythagoras, and is composed of absolute ideas attached to signs and numbers; by its combinations, it realizes the mathematics of thought. Solomon represented this alphabet by seventy-two names, written upon thirty-six talismans. Eastern initiates still call these the "little keys" or clavicles of Solomon. These keys are described, and their use explained, in a book the source of whose traditional dogma is the patriarch Abraham. This book is called the Sepher Yetzirah; with the aid of the Sepher Yetzirah one can penetrate the {xiii} hidden sense of the Zohar, the great dogmatic treatise of the Qabalah of the Hebrews. The Clavicles of Solomon, forgotten in the course of time, and supposed lost, have been rediscovered by ourselves; without trouble we have opened all the doors of those old sanctuaries where absolute truth seemed to sleep, --- always young, and always beautiful, like that princess of the childish legend, who, during a century of slumber, awaits the bridegroom whose mission it is to awaken her.
After our book, there will still be mysteries, but higher and farther in the infinite depths. This publication is a light or a folly, a mystification or a monument. Read, reflect, and judge.
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