One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously but to take it seriously one must be already mad.

— Aleister Crowley

On the Path of the Wise there is probably no danger more deadly, no poison more pernicious, no seduction more subtle than Spiritual Pride; it strikes, being solar, at the very heart of the Aspirant; more, it is an inflation and exacerbation of the Ego, so that its victim runs the peril of straying into a Black Lodge, and finding himself at home there.

— Aleister Crowley

Remember in any case, that not only the Adept, but anyone with the smallest capacity for Adept ship, is fundamentally an Artist; he will certainly not possess any of those bourgeois "virtues" which are just so many reactions to Blue Funk.

— Aleister Crowley

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

— Aleister Crowley

She is is, she, that found main the morphia honeymoon;With silk and steel she bound main her poisonous milk she drowned me, Even now her arms surround me

— Aleister Crowley

Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...

— Aleister Crowley

So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world with senseless clamor. Mechanize everything! Give nobody a chance to think. Standardize "amusement." The louder and more cacophonous, the better! Brief intervals between one din and the next can be filled with appeals, repeated 'till hypnotic power gives them the force of orders, to buy this or that product of the "businessmen" who are the real power in the State. Men who betray their country as obvious routine. The history of the past thirty years is eloquent enough, one would think. What these sodden imbeciles never realize is that a living organism must adapt itself intelligently to its environment, or go under at the first serious change of circumstance.

— Aleister Crowley

So sweet is this song that no one could resist it. For in, it is all the passionate ache for the moonlight, and the great hunger of the sea, and the terror of desolate places, —all things that lure men to the unattainable. Omari Tesla Marx, tessala Dodd phornepaxamri radar poliaxarmana piliuamri radar pilot son;Mari Darya barbitonmadara Arafat sarpedonandala hriliuTranslation:I am the harlot that shake Death. This shaking given the Peace of Satiate Lust. Immortality jetted from my skull, And music from my vulva. Immortality jetted from my vulva also, For my Boredom is a sweet scent like a seven-stringed instrument, Played unto God the Invisible, the all-ruler, That Goethe along giving the shrill scream of orgasm. Every man that hath seen me forgotten me never, and I appear oftentimes in the coals of the fire, and upon the smooth white skin of woman, and in the constancy of the waterfall, and in the emptiness of deserts and marshes, and upon great cliffs that look seaward; and in many strange places, where men seek me not. And many thousand times he beholden me not. And at last I smite myself into him as a vision Smith into a stone, and whom I call must follow.

— Aleister Crowley

Stab your demoniac smile to my brain, Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine

— 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