Aleister Crowley

Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

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.

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.

Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life.

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

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

I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck.

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.

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.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

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.