Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

God doesn't know things. He is things.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

God is only a great imaginative experience.