01c. 1911 ADI'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
02c. 1911 ADMay 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!Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
03c. 1911 ADI've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
04c. 1911 ADFurther, 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 for ever; only revolution can save it.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
05c. 1911 ADAm 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 true ideal; and that the base man does the opposite by concentrating all his abilities on the amassing of wealth?'Exactly; that is the real distinction between the artist and the bourgeois, or, if you prefer it, between the gentleman and the cad. Money, and the things money can buy, have no value, for there is no question of creation, but only of exchange. Houses, lands, gold, jewels, even existing works of art, may be tossed about from one hand to another; they are so, constantly. But neither you nor I can write a sonnet; and what we have, our appreciation of art, we did not buy. We inherited the germ of it, and we developed it by the sweat of our brows. The possession of money helped us, but only by giving us time and opportunity and the means of travel. Anyhow, the principle is clear; one must sacrifice the lower to the higher, and, as the Greeks did with their oxen, one must fatten and bedeck the lower, so that it may be the worthier offering.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
06c. 1911 ADA Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
07c. 1911 ADSome men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
08c. 1911 ADOne would go mad if one took the Bible seriously but to take it seriously one must be already mad.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
10c. 1911 ADScience is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
11c. 1911 ADIndubitably, 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 of physics.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
12c. 1911 ADWoe to that seven months abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a wall in China!Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
13c. 1911 ADI seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, ''Of couse I am - sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
14c. 1911 ADDon't talk for five minutes, there's a good chap! I've a strange feeling come over me--almost as if I were going to think!Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
15c. 1911 ADFirst of all, you must never speak of anything by its name -- in that country. So, if you see a tree on a mountain, it will be better to say 'Look at the green on the high'; for that's how they talk -- in that country. And whatever you do, you must find a false reason for doing it -- in that country. If you rob a man, you must say it is to help and protect him: that's the ethics -- of that country. And everything of value has no value at all -- in that country. You must be perfectly commonplace if you want to be a genius -- in that country. And everything you like you must pretend not to like; and anything that is there you must pretend is not there -- in that country. And you must always say that you are sacrificing yourself in the cause of religion, and morality, and humanity, and liberty, and progress, when you want to cheat your neighbour -- in that country."Good heavens!" cried Iliel, 'are we going to England?Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
16c. 1911 ADThe priestess of Artemis took hold of her almost with the violence of a lover, and whisked her away into a languid ecstasy of reverie. She communicated her own enthusiasm to the girl, and kept her mind occupied with dreams, faery-fervid, of uncharted seas of glory on which her galleon might sail, undiscovered countries of spice and sweetness, Eldorado and Utopia and the City of God.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
17c. 1911 ADBeauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never restAleister Crowley / quote ↗
18c. 1911 ADTo read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
19c. 1911 ADLisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But--on the top of that--he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
21c. 1911 ADIn this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
22c. 1911 ADEach being is, exactly as you are, the sole centre of a Universe in no wise identical with, or even assimilable to, your own. The impersonal Universe of Nature is only an abstraction, approximately true, of the factors which it is convenient to regard as common to all. The Universe of another is therefore necessarily unknown to, and unknowable by, you; but it induces currents of energy in yours by determining in part your reactions. Use men and women, therefore, with the absolute respect due to inviolable standards of measurement; verify your own observations by comparison with similar judgements made by them; and, studying the methods which determine their failure or success, acquire for yourself the wit and skill required to cope with your own problems.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
23c. 1911 ADIt 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.Aleister Crowley / quote ↗
24c. 1911 ADWhen you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God.”-Review of Ida Craddock’s “Heavenly BridegroomsAleister Crowley / quote ↗
