Today we are going to share some of Aleister Crowley’s famous quotes. These are things he said throughout his life which was lived from 1975 – 1947. Although he was one of the famed occultists of his time, he may be even more famous today.
You can learn a lot about a man by the words that they use throughout their life. Although actions do speak louder than words in many ways, the things we say can be powerful to ourselves as well as to others. This may be even more true when you are speaking about someone who lived their life as an occultist. A practitioner of magick can tell you that words are powerful. Therefore, wouldn’t the words of an occultist carry additional weight?
Although he spoke much about magick and paganism, he also often touched upon similar subjects as well as basic things that everyone can relate to. Keep on reading to see which of his words and quotes you can relate to decades after they were spoken or which quotes make you think or inspire you to walk a path never walked before.
Aleister Crowley Quotes
- “The key of joy is disobedience.” – Aleister Crowley
- “It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one’s environment.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Intolerance is evidence of impotence.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Every man and every woman is a star.” – Aleister Crowley
- “The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.” – Aleister Crowley
- “I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.” – Aleister Crowley
- “We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.” – Aleister Crowley
- “I’m a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.” – Aleister Crowley
- “The people who have really made history are the martyrs.” – Aleister Crowley
- “A man friends are more capable of working him harm than strangers, and his greatest danger lies in his own habits.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Sex is the sacred song of the soul; Sex is the sanctuary of Self.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
- Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.” – Aleister Crowley
- “I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul” – Aleister Crowley
- “If you cut off a man’s head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer.” – Aleister Crowley
- “There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.” – Aleister Crowley
- “If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.” – Aleister Crowley
- “The customer is usually wrong, but statistics indicate that it doesn’t pay to tell him so” – Aleister Crowley
- “Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life….” – Aleister Crowley
- “Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.” – Aleister Crowley
- “The first condition of success in magick is purity of purpose.” – Aleister Crowley
- “…in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.” – Aleister Crowley
- “As long as sexual relations are complicated by religious, social and financial considerations, so long will they cause all kinds of cowardly, dishonorable and disgusting behavior.” – Aleister Crowley
- “It is necessary that we stop, once for all, this ignorant meddling with other people’s business. Each individual must be left free to follow his own path.” – Aleister Crowley
- “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!” – Aleister Crowley
- “I’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
- “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.” – Aleister Crowley
- “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.” – Aleister Crowley
- “What is the meaning of Initiation? It is the Path to the realization of your Self as the sole, the supreme, the absolute of all Truth, Beauty, Purity, Perfection!” – Aleister Crowley
- “Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.” – Aleister Crowley
- “I do not think we were afraid of death; life had become such an infinitely boring alternation between a period of stimulation which failed to stimulate and of depression which hardly even depressed.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Indubitably, Magick 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.” – Aleister Crowley
- “To resist and subdue Nature is to make for one’s self a personal and imperishable life: it is to break free from the vicissitudes of Life and Death.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Astrology has no more useful function than this, to discover the inmost nature of a man and to bring it out into his consciousness, that he may fulfill it according to the law of light.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Inevitably anyone with an independent mind must become ‘one who resists or opposes authority or established conventions’: a rebel. If enough people come to agree with, and follow, the Rebel, we now have a Devil. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have — Greatness.” – Aleister Crowley
- “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.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say ”no.” I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible.” – Aleister Crowley
- “I have been accused of being a ‘black magician.’ No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.” – Aleister Crowley
- “Light illuminates the path of humanity: it is our own fault if we go over the brink.
- The technical developments of almost every form of wealth [e.g., oil, minerals] are the forebears of Big Business; and Big Business, directly or indirectly, is the immediate cause of War.” – Aleister Crowley
- “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.” – Aleister Crowley
- “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” – Aleister Crowley
Related: The Darkest Quotes about the Devil and Quotes about Paganism.
Conclusion
Regardless of how you feel about the man Aleister Crowley, one can not help but be intrigued by the words he chose to say. Reading quotes by Crowley can be thought-provoking. It is also quite interesting reading quotes from someone a lifetime ago and seeing how not that much has changed in the basic way we live, feel, and think.
I hope you have enjoyed the words by the late Mr. Crowley and have a greater understanding that no matter how much his life and beliefs may have been different than yours today, you can still connect with him on how he thought about both the basic things in life as well as subjects that are more provocative or philosophical in nature.
I’m Alice Judy and AnQuotes is a fun hobby for me. We know that everyone loves a great quote and our mission here is simple – to be the best and most interesting quote site in the world! If you have quotes you would like us to cover, please contact us.
