...in the absence of will power, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
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Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley (/ˈkroʊli/; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life. Born to a wealthy Plymouth Brethren family in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Crowley rejected this fundamentalist Christian faith to pursue an interest in Western esotericism. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he focused his attentions on mountaineering and poetry, resulting in several publications. Some biographers allege that here he was recruited into a British intelligence agency, further suggesting that he remained a spy throughout his life. In 1898 he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett. Moving to Boleskine House by Loch Ness in Scotland, he went mountaineering in Mexico with Oscar Eckenstein, before studying Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. He married Rose Edith Kelly and in 1904 they honeymooned in Cairo, Egypt, where Crowley claimed to have been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who provided him with The Book of the Law, a sacred text that served as the basis for Thelema. Announcing the start of the Æon of Horus, The Book declared that its followers should "Do what thou wilt" and seek to align themselves with their True Will through the practice of magic
The ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript.
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 worthwhile.
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.
Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.
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 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 most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to Earth!
We must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige.
Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.
Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.
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.
What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.
I've written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won't come.
Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.
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.