T H E G R E A T B E A S T
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”
“Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”
"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."
"The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript."
"The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing."
"The people who have really made history are the martyrs."
"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal."
"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."
"To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all."
“Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...”
"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness."
“It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.”
“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
"Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty."
“Your friends will notice at once that glib vacuities fail to impress, and hate you, and tell lies about you.
It's worth it.”
It's worth it.”
"Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life."
“Since all things are God, in all things thou seest just so much of God as thy capacity affordeth thee.”
"Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people."
“Don'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!”
“The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.”
"Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales."
"Intolerance is evidence of impotence."
"Indubitably, magic 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."
"In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless."
“The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to Earth!”
"If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad."
“It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.”
“Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.”
"I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff."
"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner."
"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."
“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.”
"I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck."
“The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.”
“What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.”
''There is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is, "Garçon! Un Pernod!"''
"It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair."
“I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.”
" 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."
“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!”
“Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man's brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn't understand you at all.”
"I can imagine myself on my death-bed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world, like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman."
“People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn't, for the most part' on the contrary, it's a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking, just as exercising the muscles helps the body to become temporarily unconscious of its weight, its pain, its weariness, and the foreknowledge of its doom.”
"Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another."
"The supreme satisfaction is to be able to despise one's neighbor and this fact goes far to account for religious intolerance. It is evidently consoling to reflect that the people next door are headed for hell."
“Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.”
“The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without.”
“Every man and every woman is a star.”
Aleister Crowley - The Call Of The First Æthyr (English)