Aleister Crowley

My word is law, and my will is absolute.

For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.

He shall fall down into a pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of reason.

Thou hast no right but to do thy will...

What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.

Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.

Balance every thought with its opposition. Because the marriage of them is the destruction of illusion.

It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.

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.

Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.

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.

We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.

To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

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.

Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.

The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

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