All Quotes

"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The natural laziness of the mind tempts one to eschew authors who demand a continuous effort of intelligence. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. People tell me that they must read the papers so as to know what is going on. In the first place, they could hardly find a worse guide. Most of what is printed turns out to be false, sooner or later. Even when there is no deliberate deception, the account must, from the nature of the case, be presented without adequate reflection and must seem to possess an importance which time shows to be absurdly exaggerated; or vice versa. No event can be fairly judged without background and perspective."

"The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing. Its overshadowing formlessness obsesses the mind. The way to beat an enemy is to define him clearly, to analyse and measure him. Once an idea is intelligently grasped, it ceases to threaten the mind with the terrors of the unknown."

"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. One may be wholeheartedly eager to do something which is as easy as falling off a log; and yet it is impossible."

"Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another."

"I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck. I grow delirious to contemplate the delicious horrors that are certain to happen to me. This is the keynote of my life, the untrammeled delight in every possibility of existence, potential or actual."

"Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. ... Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medial Trust."

"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."

"Intolerance is evidence of impotence."

"The Camel said that someone, whom she called "the Wizard", wished to communicate with me. I am not a spiritualist who accepts any message as of divine origin. I insist on knowing with whom I am talking, and on his showing such qualities of mind that the communication will benefit me. Now, as it happened, I had a test question to my hand. I had taken the name Baphomet as my motto in the O.T.O. For six years and more I had tried to discover the proper way to spell this name. I knew that it must have eight letters, and also that the numerical and literal correspondences must be such as to express the meaning of the name in such a ways as to confirm what scholarship had found out about it, and also to clear up those problems which archaeologists had so far failed to solve. Here, then, was an ideal test of the integrity and capacity of the Camel's Wizard. I flung the question in his face. "If you possess the superior knowledge which you claim, you can tell me how to spell Baphomet!" The Camel knew nothing of the Hebrew and little of the Greek. She had no idea that a conventional system existed by which one could check the accuracy of any given orthography. Her Wizard answered my question without hesitation. "Wrong," said I, "there must be eight letters." "True," he answered, "there is an R at the end." The answer struck me in the midriff. One theory of the name is that it represents the words βαφὴ μήτεος, the baptism of wisdom; another, that it is a corruption of a title meaning "Father Mithras". Needless to say, the suffix R supported the latter theory. I added up the word as spelt by the Wizard. It totalled 729. This number had never appeared in my Cabbalistic working and therefore meant nothing to me. It however justified itself as being the cube of nine. The word κηφας, the mystic title given by Christ to Peter as the cornerstone of the Church, has this same value. So far, the Wizard had shown great qualities! He had cleared up the etymological problem and shown why the Templars should have given the name Baphomet to their so-called idol. Baphomet was Father Mithras, the cubical stone which was the corner of the Temple. I therefore felt justified in concluding that the Wizard really possessed sufficient intelligence to make it worth my while to listen to him. I hastily recorded the dialogue to that point. My next question inquired his name. He replied "Amalantrah". I added this up. This time the result was conclusive. Its value is 729. Already he had shown me that I, in my office as Baphomet, was the rock on which the New Temple should be built, and he now identified himself with me through his own name being of equivalent value. There was however so far no link between the Order to which he belonged and the Great Order; 729 is not a significant number in the Cabbala of Thelema. But when I asked him to assign a mystic name to the Camel, he replied "Ahitha" which adds to 555, an obvious correlative with my own number in the Great Order, 666."

"The customer is usually wrong; but statistics indicate that it doesn't pay to tell him so."

"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."

"How right politicians are to look upon their constituents as cattle! Anyone who has any experience of dealing with any class as such knows the futility of appealing to intelligence, indeed to any other qualities than those of brutes."

"She certainly gave me what I've been losing. Youth's intensity, its craving, the soul-priapism, huge lust and fierce to her, clamour for her to realize with me that mightiest marriage-dream, that Sacrament of Satan that may be consummated only beneath Night's dome, in utmost silence, because its Elements are not symbols of things, but They themselves."

"When I was Levi, I drew myself as Ayin or Baphomet, 'The Devil' with Beast's Head. This is the Beast throned, crowned, exalted; the leaper, the erect, the butter-in. Her womb is my city, Babel. This Ayin is then my phallic will, my Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwaz, who was afterwards called Satan."

"Come, Come, Come, Aiwaz! Come, thou Devil Our Lord!"

"My light! O my father the Devil! It hath made all things one, being perfect, even as doth the Darkness!"

"And Her Concoction shall be sweet in our mixed mouths, the Sacrament that giveth thanks to Aiwaz, our Lord God the Devil, that He hath fused His Beast's soul with His Scarlet Whore's, to be One Soul completed, that It may set His image in the Temple of Man, and thrust His Will's rod over them and rule them. And that imperléd sea, dark with that oozy shore-mud which it washed, shall wash us, body and mind, of all that is not He, moisten our throats and loosen our loud Song of praise, Thanksgiving unto Him."

"I sing for God, our Devil, our Lord, Aiwaz."

"And know that all my joy, perfect, transcending sense, is given of Aiwaz, whom we call the Devil, whose name is Will, loud-uttered by cocaine, is Love."

"Our Lord the Devil's their Word, the Word Thelema, spoken of me The Beast."

"Ηe knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance."

"Though Melville omitted it, Captain Ahab said, "In one sense, Aleister Crowley is lower than whale shit. In another, he's as high as God's hat. The true shaman knows that God's hat is made out of dried whale shit.""

"I think there is too much darkness in magic. I can understand that it is part of the theatre. I can understand Aleister Crowley — who I think was a great intellect that was sometimes let down by his own flair for showmanship — but he did a lot to generate the scary aura of the magician that you find these sad, Crowleyite fucks making a fetish of. The ones who say "oh we’re into Aleister Crowley because he was the wickedest man in the world, and we’re also into Charles Manson because we’re bad. And we are middle-class as well, but we’re bad." There are some people who seek evil — I don't think there is such a thing as evil — but there are people who seek it as a kind of Goth thing. That just adds to the murk to what to me is a very lucid and fluorescent subject. What occultism needs is someone to open the window, it's too stuffy and it smells. Let's get some fresh air, throw open the curtains — I can't go for that posturing, spooky guy stuff."

"Crowley is, admittedly, a complicated case. One can hardly blame people for feeling hatred and fear toward Crowley when Crowley himself so often exulted in provoking just such emotions. Indeed he tended to view those emotions as inevitable, given what he regarded as the revolutionary nature and power of his teachings and the prevailing hypocrisy of society ... Revile Christianity (but not Christ, mind you) as he might, seek its downfall as he did, Crowley desired nothing less than a full-fledged successor religion — complete with a guiding Logos that would endure for millennia, as had the teachings of Jesus. "Thelema" was the Logos Crowley proclaimed, Greek for "Will." "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" was its central credo. Let us concede that this credo — so redolent, seemingly, of license and anarchy, dark deeds and darker dreams — terrifies on first impact, as does Crowley the man. ... Say what you will of Crowley, judge his failings as you will, there remains a man as protean, brilliant, courageous, flabbergasting, as ever you could imagine. There endure achievements that no reasoned account of his life may ignore..."

"The key to understanding Crowley is the same as the key to understanding the Marquis de Sade. Both wasted an immense amount of energy screaming defiance at the authority they resented so much, and lacked the insight to see that they were shaking their fists as at abstraction."

"It is too easy to see Crowley as an overgrown juvenile delinquent with a passion for self-advertisement. But there was another Crowley, the Crowley recognized and admired by Frank Bennett. Unless we understand this, we totally fail to grasp the extraordinary influence that Crowley could exert on women like Rose and Leah, and on men like Neuberg, Sullivan and Bennett. They came to believe that Crowley was exactly what he claimed to be: a great teacher, the messiah of a new age. And this was not the gullibility of born dupes; Sullivan, at least, was one of the most intelligent men of his age (as his book on Beethoven reveals). Crowley was, in part, a great teacher, a man of profound insights. Mencius says: "Those who follow the part of themselves that is great become great men; those who follow the part of themselves that is small will become small men." But Crowley was a strange mixture who devoted about equal time to following both parts of himself, and so became a curious combination of greatness and smallness. A summary of his life, and his extraordinary goings-on, makes us aware of the smallness; but it would be sheer short-sightedness to overlook the element of greatness that so impressed Bennett."

"I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed ... from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty."

"It would be better for me... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself."

"In every one of us there are two ruling and directing principles, whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead; the one being an innate desire of pleasure; the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence."

"Oh dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him."

"One should never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him."

"Has a philosopher like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding?"

"μηδὲν πρὸ τοῦ δικαίου"

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

"ἐγὼ δὲ οὐδὲν ἐπίσταμαι πλέον πλὴν βραχέος, ὅσον λόγον παρ᾽ ἑτέρου σοφοῦ λαβεῖν καὶ ἀποδέξασθαι μετρίως."

"Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom."

"Anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding is like a blind man on the right road."

"The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are."

"If the entire soul, then, follows without rebellion the part which loves wisdom, the result is that in general each part can carry out its own function—can be just, in other words—and in particular each is able to enjoy pleasures which are its own, the best, and, as far as possible, the truest. ... When one of the other parts takes control, there are two results: it fails to discover its own proper pleasure, and it compels the other parts to pursue a pleasure which is not their own, and not true."

"How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem."

"In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams "that I should make music." The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words: Make and cultivate music, said the dream. And hitherto I imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has always been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music."

"[Why is suicide held not to be right?] There is a doctrine uttered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door to his prison and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not understand. Yet I too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. ...And if one of your possessions, an ox or an ass, for example took the liberty of putting himself out of the way when you had given no intimation of your wish that he should die, would you not be angry with him, and would you not punish him if you could? ...Then there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as he is now summoning me."

"I am quite ready, Simmias and Cebes, that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded that I am going to other gods who are wise and good and to men departed who are better than those whom I leave behind; and therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, and, as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good than for the evil."

"The true disciple of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he repine at that which he has always been pursuing and desiring?"

"When does the soul obtain truth?—for in attempting to consider anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived. ...Then must not existence be revealed to her in thought, if at all? ...And thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her—neither sounds nor sights nor pain nor any pleasure—when she has as little as possible to do with the body, and has no bodily sense or feeling, but is aspiring after being? ...And in this the philosopher dishonors the body; his soul runs away from the body and desires to be alone and by herself?"

"The body is a source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food; and is also liable to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after truth: and by filling us so full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies, and idols, and every sort of folly, prevents our ever having, as people say, so much as a thought."

"Whence come wars, and fighting, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in service of the body; and in consequence of all these things, the time which ought to be given to philosophy is lost."

"Either knowledge is not to be attained at all, or if at all, after death. For then, and not til then, the soul will be in herself alone and without the body."

"In this present life, I reckon that we make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible concern or interest in the body, and are not saturated with the bodily nature, but remain pure until the hour when God himself is pleased to release us. And then the foolishness of the body will be cleared away and we shall be pure and hold converse with other pure souls, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere; and this is surely the light of truth. For no impure thing is allowed to approach the pure. These are the sort of words, Simmias, which the true lovers of wisdom cannot help saying to one another, and thinking."

"And now that the hour of departure is appointed to me, this is the hope with which I depart, and not I only, but every man that believes that he has his mind purified."