Aleister Crowley
Their false compassion is called compassion and their false understanding is called understanding, for this is their most potent spell.Collection: Compassion
Practically, Science is true; and Faith is foolish.Collection: Foolish
I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle.Collection: Regret
Imagine listening to Beethoven with the prepossession that C is a good note and F a bad one; yet this is exactly the stand point from which all uninitiates contemplate the universe. Obviously, they miss the music.Collection: Missing
Do not imagine that art or anything else is other than high magic! - is a system of holy hieroglyph. The artist, the initiate, thus frames his mysteries. The rest of the world scoff, or seek to understand, or pretend to understand; some few obtain the truth.Collection: Art
The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.Collection: Mistake
Since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.Collection: Capacity
I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.Collection: Views
The man who denounces life merely defines himself as the man who is unequal to it.Collection: Men
I am alone. There is no God where I am.Collection: There Is No God
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.Collection: Love
Further, 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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Mean
There are hardly half a dozen writers in England today who have not sold out to the enemy. Even when their good work has been a success, Mammon grips them and whispers: More money for more work.Collection: Writing
I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.Collection: Mother
Initiation means the Journey Inwards: nothing is changed or can be changed; but all is trulier understood with every step.Collection: Mean
The nails from a suicide's coffin, and the skull of the parricide, were of course no trouble; for Vesquit never traveled without these household requisites.Collection: Suicide
Religion itself becomes offensively monotonous. On every point of vantage are pagodas -- stupid stalagmites of stagnant piety.Collection: Stupid
The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible.Collection: Organization
Love is the law, love under will.Collection: Love Is
In every Magical, or similar system, it is invariably the first condition which the Aspirant must fulfill: he must once and for all and for ever put his family outside his magical circle.Even the Gospels insist clearly and weightily on this.Christ himself (i.e. whoever is meant by this name in this passage) callously disowns his mother and his brethren (Luke VIII, 19). And he repeatedly makes discipleship contingent on the total renunciation of all family ties. He would not even allow a man to attend his father's funeral!Is the magical tradition less rigid?Not on your life!Collection: Mother
The old spelling MAGICK has been adopted throughout in order to distinguish the Science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.Collection: Order
30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops an does naught. 31. If power asks why, then power is weakness.Collection: Weakness
As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.Collection: Self Confidence
I believe in one Gnostic and Catholic Church of Light, Life, Love and Liberty, the Word of whose Law is THELEMA .Collection: Believe
Love stories are only fit for the solace of people in the insanity of puberty. No healthy adult human being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular person or not.Collection: Love
The word of Sin is RestrictionCollection: Sin
The True Will is thus both determined by its equations, and free because those equation are simply its own name, spelt out fully.Collection: Names
This formula of Love is universal; all the laws of Nature are its servitors. Thus, gravitation, chemical affinity, electrical potential, and the rest - and these are alike mere aspects of the general law - are so many differently-observed statements of the unique tendency.Collection: Love
This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.Collection: Taken
Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.Collection: Would Be
There is a splendour in my name hidden and glorious, as the sun of midnight is ever the son.Collection: Son
A madhouse of frenzied moneymaking and frenzied pleasure-seeking, with none of the corners chipped off. It is beautifully situatedand the air reminds one curiously of Edinburgh.Collection: Air
Crime, folly, sickness and all phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear aversion or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them.Collection: Aversion
I must make MAGICK the essential factor in the life of ALL. In presenting this book to the world, I must then explain and justify my position by formulating a definition of MAGICK and setting forth its main principles in such a way that ALL may understand instantly that their souls, their lives, in every relation with every other human being and every circumstance, depend upon MAGICK and the right comprehension and right application thereof.Collection: Book
Light, Life and Love are like three glow-worms at thy feet: the whole universe of stars, the dewdrops on the grass whereon thou walkest!Collection: Stars
I cling unto the burning Æthyr like Lucifer that fell through the Abyss, and by the fury of his flight kindled the air. And I am Belial, for having seen the Rose upon thy breast, I have denied God. And I am Satan! I am Satan! I am cast out upon a burning crag! And the sea boils about the desolation thereof. And already the vultures gather, and feast upon my flesh.Collection: Air
The student, if he attains any success in the following practices, will find himself confronted by things too glorious or dreadful to be described. It is essential that he remain the master of all he beholds, hears or conceives; otherwise he will be the slave of illusion, and the prey of madness.Collection: Practice
Oh, how superior is the Eye of Horus to the Mouth of Isis!Collection: Eye
The first task of the Magician in every ceremony is therefore to render his Circle absolutely impregnable.Collection: Circles
Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in all is the seal of unity.Collection: Diversity
To use legal or financial constraint to compel either abstention or submission, is entirely horrible, unnatural and absurd.Collection: Use
Every incarnation that we remember must increase our comprehension of ourselves as who we are.Collection: Who We Are
He shall fall down into a pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of reason.Collection: Dog
I will interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soulCollection: Soul
The intention of this Book of The Law is perfectly simple. Whatever your sexual predilections may be, you are free, by the Law of Thelema, to the the star you are, to go your own way rejoicing.Collection: Stars
There is no part of me that is not of the Gods.Collection: Thelema