Quotes from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

Aleister Crowley ·  960 pages

Rating: (658 votes)


“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.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life....”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography



“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


“Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography


About the author

Aleister Crowley
Born place: in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 12, 1875
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“so we were playing all this game then and thinking that to be a soldier was to be the best thing in the world because gun is looking so powerful and the men in movie are looking so powerful and strong when they are killing people,but I am knowing now that to be a soldier is only to be weak and not strong, and to have no food to eat and not to eat whatever you want, and also to have people making you do thing that you are not wanting to do and not to be doing whatever you are wanting which is what they are doing in movie. But I am only knowing this now because I am soldier now.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, quote from Beasts of No Nation


“Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material.


The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


“When the wind blows,the grass bends.”
― Confucius, quote from The Analects


“It wouldn't kill you to flirt a little, so I don't remember this assignment as totally sucking. I'm babysitting a guy who thinks he's a leprechaun, and I'm rescuing a has-been horse. The least you could do I grab my ass once in a while.”
― Janet Evanovich, quote from Plum Lucky


“His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from Farewell Summer


Interesting books

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
(101.8K)
Helter Skelter: The...
by Vincent Bugliosi
Bloodfever
(82.4K)
Bloodfever
by Karen Marie Moning
Memnoch the Devil
(69.7K)
Memnoch the Devil
by Anne Rice
Let the Right One In
(71.2K)
Let the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
(39.7K)
Twenty Love Poems an...
by Pablo Neruda
The Drawing of the Three
(173.7K)
The Drawing of the T...
by Stephen King

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.