Aleister Crowley Quotes

It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant. They hold that the souls of all who perish in battle or by the hands of the executioner are immortal. Hence a passion for propagating their race and a contempt for death. They are wont to bury rather than to burn their dead

Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead.

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

Virtually every civilized society today holds sacred the right to peaceably bury their dead.

When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with skulls and mummies and things like that.

Corpses are more fit to be thrown out than is dung.

Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement than any other single subject.

In order to know a community, one must observe the styles of its funerals and know what manner of men they bury with most ceremony.

Let the dead bury the dead.

Even if I wanted, I cannot do anything. When they die, we always send for their co-religionists. Muslims take the Muslim's body to bury it, Hindus come and take away the dead to be cremated and Christians come and bury their dead.

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin.

He sat upon his throne, which is made of skulls.

Funeral: a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

In Moscow they do not pay much attention to the living but keep their cemeteries in a splendid state.

in the place I am from ... a grave is topped off with a huge mound of loose earth - carelessly, as if piled up in child's play, not serious at all - because death is just another way of being, and the dead will not stay put, and sometimes the actions of the dead are more significant, more profound, than their actions in life, and no structure of concrete or stone can contain them.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.

Life's true face is the skull.

He that unburied lies wants not his hearse, For unto him a tomb's the Universe.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.