Aleister Crowley Quotes

MAGICK is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.*

I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.

Your friends will notice at once that glib vacuities fail to impress, and hate you, and tell lies about you. It's worth it.

This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.

Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.

The essence of MAGICK is simple enough in all conscience. It is not otherwise with the art of government. The Aim is simply prosperity; but the theory is tangled, and the practice beset with briars. In the same way MAGICK is merely to be and to do. I should add: "to suffer". For Magick is the verb; and it is part of the Training to use the passive voice. This is, however, a matter of Initiation rather than of Magick in its ordinary sense. It is not my fault if being is baffling, and doing desperate!

To 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.

The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's!

There is great danger in this Golden Mean, one of whose main objects is to steer clear of shipwreck, Scylla being as fatal as Charybdis. No, this lofty and equable attitude is worse than wrong unless it derives from striking the balance between two very distant opposites. One of the worst perils of the present time is that, in the reaction against ignorant bigotry, people no longer dare to make up their minds about anything. The very practice, which the A∴A∴ so strongly and persistently advocates, tends to make people feel that any positive attitude or gesture is certainly wrong, whatever may be right. They forget that the opposite may, within the limit of the universe of discourse, amount to nothing.

[....]

Of course, in no case does the Golden Mean advise hesitating, trimming, hedging, compromising; the very object of ensuring an exact balance in your weapon is that its blow may be clean and certain.

I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy.

The first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.

Dreams are imperfections of sleep; even so is consciousness the imperfection of waking.
Dreams are impurities in the circulation of the blood; even so it's consciousness a disorder of life.
Dreams are without proportion, without good sense, without truth; so also is consciousness.
Awake from dream, the truth is known: awake from waking. The truth is: The Unknown

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

Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will.

If Osiris, Christ, and Mahomet were mad, then indeed is madness the key to the door of the Temple.