Salzburg, Austria - 20071. “After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.”
2. “All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.”
3. "Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology."
4. “A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”
5. “And if tonight my soul may find her peacein sleep, and sink in good oblivion,and in the morning wake like a new-opened flowerthen I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.”
6. “And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time.”
7. »A real individual has a spark of danger in him, a menace to society. Quench this spark and you quench the individuality, you obtain a social unit, not an integral man. All modern progress has tended, and still tends, to the production of quenched social units: dangerless beings, ideal creatures!«
8. »Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth.«
9. »A thing that you sincerely believe in cannot be wrong, because belief does not come at will. It comes only from the Holy Ghost within. Therefore a thing you truly believe in, cannot be wrong.«
10. »Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin to recognise the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall be lords on the earth.«
11. ”Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.”
12. “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
13. “Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.”
14. “But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
15. »But where is the point to life? Where is the point to love? Where, if it comes to the point, is the point to a bunch of violets? There is no point. Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.«
16. »Civilisations rise in waves, and pass away in waves. And not till science, or art, tries to catch the ultimate meaning of the symbols that float on the last waves of the prehistoric period; that is, the period before our own; shall we be able to get ourselves into right relation with man as man is and has been and will always be. In the days before Homer, men in Europe were not mere brutes and savages and prognathous monsters: neither were they simple-minded children. Men are always men, and though intelligence takes different forms, men are always intelligent: they are not empty brutes, or dumb-bells en masse.«
17. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.”
18. »Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes!«
19. ”Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.”
20. "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."
21. ”Even the rainbow has a bodymade of the drizzling rainand is an architecture of glistening atomsbuilt up, built upyet you can't lay your hand on it,nay, nor even your mind.”
22. “Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.”
23. »Every goal is a grave, when you get there.«
24. “Everyman has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.”
25. ”Every race which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has perished.”
26. »Every Religion, every philosophy, and science itself, each has a clue to the cosmos, to the becoming aware of the cosmos. Each clue leads to its own goal of consciousness, then is exhausted. So religions exhaust themselves, so science exhausts itself, once the human consciousness reaches its own limit. The infinite of the human consciousness lies in an infinite number of different starts to an infinite number of different goals; which somehow, we know when we get there, is one goal. But the new start is from a point in the hitherto unknown.«
27. »Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life.«
28. »For God's sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.«
29. “For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.”
30. "God is only a great imaginative experience."
31. "How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression."
32. »However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived.«
33. "I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful."
34. »I am convinced that the majority of people today have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint. On the contrary, I think the vast majority would be much more generous, good-hearted and decent if they felt they dared be. I am convinced that people want to be more decent, more good-hearted than our social system of money and grab allows them to be. The awful fight for money, into which we are all forced, hurts our good nature more than we can bear. I am sure this is true of a vast number of people.«
35. “I am here myself; as though this heave of effortAt starting other life, fulfilled my own:Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a coreOf seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown By all the blood of the rose-bush into being--Strange, that the urgent will in me, to setMy mouth on hers in kisses, and so softlyTo bring together two strange sparks, beget Another life from our lives, so should sendThe innermost fire of my own dim soul out-spinningAnd whirling in blossom of flame and being upon me!That my completion of manhood should be the beginning Another life from mine! For so it looks.The seed is purpose, blossom accident.The seed is all in all, the blossom lentTo crown the triumph of this new descent. Is that it, woman? Does it strike you so?The Great Breath blowing a tiny seed of fireFans out your petals for excess of flame,Till all your being smokes with fine desire? Or are we kindled, you and I, to beOne rose of wonderment upon the treeOf perfect life, and is our possible seedBut the residuum of the ecstasy? How will you have it?--the rose is all in all,Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall?The sharp begetting, or the child begot?Our consummation matters, or does it not? To me it seems the seed is just left overFrom the red rose-flowers' fiery transience;Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the bushWhich burnt just now with marvellous immanence. Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a roseOf roses unchidden and purposeless; a roseFor rosiness only, without an ulterior motive;For me it is more than enough if the flower unclose.”
36. »I am in love - and, my God, it's 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 haven't done so already. You are wasting your life.«
37. “I believe a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.”
38. “I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.”
39. »I believe in the living extending consciousness of man. I believe the consciousness of man has now to embrace the emotions and passions of sex, and the deep effects of human physical contact. This is the glimmering edge of our awareness and our field of understanding, in the endless business of knowing ourselves.«
40. “I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.”
41. "I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies -- thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us."
42. ”I cannot get any sense of an enemy - only of a disaster.”
43. “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.”
44. “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.”
45. “If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”
46. "I don't like your miserable lonely single ''front name.'' It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind."
47. »I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me. But a work of art is an act of faith, as Michael Angelo says, and one goes on writing, to the unseen witnesses.«
48. »I feel quite anti-social, against this social whole as it exists. I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But my way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of today, perhaps is more satisfying. But I feel like an outlaw. All my work is a shot at their vey innermost strength, these banded people of today. Let them cease to be. Let them make way for another, fewer, stronger, less cowardly people.«
49. »If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.«
50. “If only we could have two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them.”
51. “I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.”
52. “I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.”
53. "I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow. it is the honest state before the apple."
54. “In every living thing there is the desire for love.”
55. “In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No, the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.”
56. ”In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends - give me the country.”
57. “I shall always be a priest of love.”
58. ”I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre.”
59. “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.”
60. "It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence."
61. ”It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.”
62. ”It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.”
63. “It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
64. "I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us."
65. “I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”
66. »Law is a very, very clumsy and mechanical instrument, and we people are very, very delicate and subtle beings.«
67. »Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being. The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which it is our business to fulfil. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstances, is a false fate. ... Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.«
68. “Let us prepare now for the death of our present "little" life, and the re-emergence in a bigger life, in touch with the moving cosmos. It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awakening. We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last. This is an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of day. The ritual of the moon in her phases, of the morning star and the evening star is for men and women separate. Then the ritual of the seasons, with the Drama and the Passion of the soul embodied in procession and dance, this is for the community, an act of men and women, a whole community, in togetherness. And the ritual of the great events in the year of stars is for nations and whole peoples. To these rituals we must return: or we must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is, we are perishing for lack of fulfilment of our greater needs, we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. It means a return to ancient forms. But we shall have to create these forms again, and it is more difficult than the preaching of an evangel. The Gospel came to tell us we were all saved. We look at the world today and realise that humanity, alas, instead of being saved from sin, whatever that may be, is almost completely lost, lost to life, and near to nullity and extermination.”
69. »Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.«
70. "Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless."
71. »Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between the two, and each has a natural respect for the other.«
72. “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.”
73. »Life is so wonderful and complex, and always relative. A man's soul is a perpetual call and answer. He can never be the call and the answer in one. This is truth, for ever: the relation between the call and the answer: between the dark God and the incarnate man: between the dark soul of woman, and the opposite dark soul of man: and finally, between the souls of man and man, strangers to one another, but answerers. So it is forever, the eternal weaving of calls and answers, and the fabric of life woven and perishing again. But the calls never cease, and the answers never fail for long. And when the fabric becomes grey and machine-made, some strange clarion-call makes men start to smash it up. So it is.«
74. "Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."
75. »Man creates a god in his own image, and the god grows old along with the men that made him. But storms sway in heaven, and the god-stuff sweeps high and angry over our heads. Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. Like the sea in storm, that beats against the rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them. Or like the sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes the feet and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of trees. - Ye must be born again. Even the gods must be born again. We must be born again.«
76. »Man is a thought-adventurer. Man is a great venture in consciousness. Where the venture started, and where it will end, nobody knows.«
77. »Man must destroy as he goes, as trees fall for trees to rise. The accumulation of life and things means rottenness. Life must destroy life, in the unfolding of creation. We save up life at the expence of the unfolding, till all is full of rottenness. Then at last, we make a break. What's to be done? Generally speaking, nothing. The dead will have to bury their dead, while the earth stinks of corpses. The individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself. Try to hold fast to the living thing, which destroys as it goes, but remains sweet. And in his soul fight, fight, fight to preserve that which is life in him from the ghastly kisses and poison-bites of the myriad evil ones. Retreat to the desert, and fight. But in his soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. The one passionate principle of creative being, which recognises the natural good, and has a sword for the swarms of evil. Fights, fights, fights to protect itself. But with itself, is strong and at peace.«
78. ”Man's ultimate love for man? Yes, yes, but only in the separate darkness of man's love for the present, unknowable God.”
79. »Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.«
80. »Men live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysics - exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin, and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future; neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone grey and opaque. We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the heart really believes in after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfilment in life and art.«
81. ”Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.”
82. “My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.”
83. »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. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not.«
84. “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.”
85. "Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description."
86. “Naught is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.”
87. “Never have ideas about children -- and never have ideas for them.”
88. “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
89. ”No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb unless the lamb is inside.”
90. »No man is or can be purely individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so, and will always be so.«
91. ”Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! / A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.”
92. »Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part. And therefore I, who am man alive, am greater than my soul, or spirit, or body, or mind, or consciousness, or anything else that is merely a part of me. I am a man, and alive. I am man alive, and as long as I can, I intend to go on being man alive.«
93. »Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilisation, which is civilisation based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom. All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total of boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored. Do as they may, they are bored. They are bored because they experience nothing. And they experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man he is dead. He is henceforth only an insect.«
94. ”Once I had a lover bright like running water, Once his face was laughing like the sky; Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter On the buttercups -- and buttercups was I.”
95. "One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."
96. "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!"
97. »Oh what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhytm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.«
98. “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.”
99. ”One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towards the other soul, not away from it. . . . To love you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures.”
100. “One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be mere rushing on.”
101. “One sheds one's sicknesses in books--repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.”
102. “One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.”
103. »Our epoch is over, a cycle of evolution is finished, our activity has lost its meaning, we are ghosts, we are seed; for our word is dead and we know not how to live wordless.«
104. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
105. “Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.”
106. »Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more than an extension of our personality, to us. To the pagan, landscape and personal background were on the whole indifferent. But the cosmos was a very real thing. A man lived with cosmos, and knew it greater than himself. Don't let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations saw it. All we see is a scientific little luminary, dwindled to a ball of blazing gas. ... We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost Helios forever, and the great orb of the Chaldeans still more. We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of nature – Nature!! – compared to the ancient magnificent living with cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos!«
107. ”Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.”
108. »Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery. It is a kind of aeroplane view. It became the popular outlook, and so today we actually are, millions of us, little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery; until we take a different view of ourselves. For man always becomes what he passionately thinks he is; since he is capable of becoming almost anything.«
109. “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.”
110. »Resolution: Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognise the Holy Ghost.«
111. "Science has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn't fit in the cause-and-effect chain. And society has a mysterious hatred of sex, because it perpetually interferes with the nice money-making schemes of social man. So the two hatreds made a combine, and sex and beauty are mere propagation appetite. / Now sex and beauty are one thin, like flame and fire. If you hate sex you hate beauty. If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex. Of course you can love old, dead beauty and hate sex. But to love living beauty you must have a reverence for sex."
112. ”Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.”
113. “Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.”
114. "Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the center of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling."
115. »Shall I expect the lion to lie down with the lamb? Shall I expect such a thing? I might as well hope for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat. It is no good, these are mere words. When the lion lies down with the lamb he is no lion, and the lamb, lying down with him, is no lamb. They are merely a neutralisation, a nothingness. If I mix fire and water, I get quenched ash. And so if I mix the lion and the lamb. They are both quenched into nothingness.«
116. "Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff."
117. »Take nothing, to say: I have it! For you can possess nothing, not even peace. Nought is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.«
118. "That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction."
119. ”The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers are corpse fingers.”
120. “The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation -- none of them -- not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.”
121. »The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man. ...The instinctive policy of Christianity towards all true pagan evidence has been and is still: suppress it, destroy it, deny it. This dishonesty has vitiated Christian thought from the start. It has, even more curiously, vitiated ethnological scientific thought the same. Curiously enough, we do not look on the Greeks and the Romans after about 600 B.C., as real pagans: not like Hindus or Persians, Babylonians or Egyptians or even Cretans, for example. We accept the Greeks and Romans as the initiators of our intellectual and political civilisation, the Jews as the fathers of our moral-religious civilisation. So these are "our sort". All the rest are mere nothing, almost idiots. All that can be attributed to the "barbarians" beyond the Greek pale: that is, to Minoans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians and Hindus, is, in the famous phrase of a famous German professor: Urdummheit. Urdummheit, or primal stupidity, is the state of all mankind before precious Homer, and of all races, all, except Greek, Jew, Roman and – ourselves! ... We look at the wonderful remains of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and old India, and we repeat to ourselves: Urdummheit! Urdummheit? We look at the Etruscan tombs and ask ourselves again, Urdummheit? primal stupidity? Why, in the oldest of peoples, in the Egyptian friezes and the Assyrian, in the Etruscan paintings and the Hindu carvings we see a splendour, a beauty, and very often a joyous, sensitive intelligence which is certainly lost in our world of Neufrechheit. If it is a question of primal stupidity or new impudence, then give me primal stupidity.«
122. “The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.”
123. “The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties. There is a whole world of life that we might know and enjoy by intuition, and by intuition alone. This is denied us, because we deny sex and beauty, the source of the intuitive life and of the insoucience which is so lovely in free animals and in plants."
124. »The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and "discovers" a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flowers, all live within a strange and for ever surging chaos. ... But man cannot live in chaos. ... Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting whirl. Then he paints the under-side of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong. Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun. But after a while, getting used to the vision, and not liking the genuine draught from chaos, commonplace man daubs a simulacrum of the window that opens on to chaos, and patches the umbrella with the painted patch of the simulacrum. That is, he has got used to the vision; it is part of his house-decoration. So that the umbrella at last looks like a glowing open firmament, of many aspects. But alas! it is all simulacrum, in innumerable patches.«
125. “The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”
126. "The future of religion is in the mystery of touch."
127. "The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action."
128. “The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.”
129. “The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.”
130. »The human soul itself is the source and well-head of creative activity. In the unconscious human soul the creative prompting issues first into the universe. Open the consciousness to this prompting, away with all your old sluice-gates, locks, dams, channels. No ideal on earth is anything more than an obstruction, in the end, to the creative issue of the spontaneous soul. Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the for ever incalculable prompting of the creative well-head within him. There is no universal law. Each being is, at his purest, a law unto himself, single, unique, a Godhead, a fountain from the unknown.«
131. “The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.”
132. "The map appears more real to us than the land."
133. »The mass is for ever vulgar, because it can't distinguish between its own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter. The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside, by the trickster, and never from the inside, by its own sincerity. The mob is always obscene, because it is always second-hand.«
134. "The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it."
135. "The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness."
136. “The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.”
137. »The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny ourselves and annul our being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire, water, are there like some great mistress whom we woo and struggle with, whom we heave and wrestle with. And all our appliances do but deny us these fine embraces, take the miracle of life away from us. The machine is the great neuter. It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it emasculates us all. When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we partake of the mysteries. But when we turn on an electric tap there is, as it were, a wad between us and the dynamic universe. We do not know what we lose by all our labour-saving appliances. Of the two evils it would be much the lesser to lose all machinery, every bit, rather than to have, as we have, hopelessly too much.«
138. »The most evil things in the world, today, are to be found under the chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the garment of our vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness covers a bog.«
139. "The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself."
140. ”The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond - but I say, `Diamond, what! This is carbon.' And my diamond may be coal or soot and my theme is carbon.”
141. “The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.”
142. ”There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed ofvast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,we know nothing of, within us.Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglementof his own ideas and his own mechanical devicesthere is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beautyand fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked lifeand me, and you, and other men and womenand grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlightand ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limboof the unknown air, and eyes so softsofter than the space between the stars,and all things, and nothing, and being and not-beingalternately palpitant,when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosureof Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effortand dangle in a last fastidious fine delightas the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless dropof purple after so much putting forthand slow mounting marvel of a little tree.”
143. “There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.”
144. »There is no such thing as sin. There is only life and anti-life.«
145. »The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new motions, new combinations, new creations.«
146. "The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being."
147. »The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stones he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are.«
148. “The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.”
149. »The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.«
150. »The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.«
151. “The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.”
152. »The white man's mind and soul are divided between these two things: innocence and lust, the Spirit and Sensuality. Sensuality always carries a stigma, and is therefore more deeply desired, or lusted after. But spirituality alone gives the sense of uplift, exaltation, and "winged life", with the inevitable reaction into sin and spite. So the white man is divided against himself. He plays off one side of himself against the other side, till it is really a tale told by an idiot, and nauseating.«
153. »The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great - quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.«
154. “The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.”
155. »They accuse me of barbarism: I want to drag England down to the level of savages. But it is this crude stupidity, deadness, about sex which I find barbaric and savage. ... That ghastly crudity of seeing in sex nothing but a functional act and a certain fumbling with clothes is, in my opinion, a low degree of barbarism, savagery. And as far as sex goes, our white civilisation is crude, barbaric, and uglily savage.«
156. »This feeling only what you allow yourselves to feel at last kills all capacity for feeling, and in the higher emotional range, you feel nothing at all. This has come to pass in our present century. The higher emotions are strictly dead. They have to be faked. And by higher emotions we mean love in all its manifestations, from genuine desire to tender love, love of one's fellow-men, and love of God: we mean love, joy, delight, hope, true indignant anger, passionate sense of justice and injustice, truth and untruth, honour and dishonour, and real belief in anything: for belief is a profound emotion that has the mind's connivance. All these things, today, are more or less dead. We have in their place the loud and sentimental counterfeit of all such emotion.«
157. »This is a piece of very old wisdom, and it will always be true. Time still moves in cycles, not in a straight line. And we are at the end of the Christian cycle. And the Logos, the good dragon of the beginning of the cycle is now the evil dragon of today. It will give its potency to no new thing, only to old and deadly things. It is the red dragon, and it must once more be slain by the heroes, since we can expect no more from the angels.«
158. “This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.”
159. "This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and the sun and stars..."
160. “This is what I believe: "That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognise and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women."”
161. “Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love; only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.”
162. »Thought, I love thought. But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas I despise that self-important game. Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness, Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience, Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read, Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion. Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges, Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.«
163. »To carry on a tradition, you must add something to the tradition. But to keep up a convention needs only the monotonous persistence of a parasite, the endless endurance of the craven, those who fear life because they are not alive, and who cannot die because they cannot live. The social beings.«
164. »To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been interjected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery today. Instead of living from the spontaneous centres, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary affective centres, our centres of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatised that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people - and not we alone - of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are raving.«
165. "To the Puritan, all things are impure, as somebody says."
166. “Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.”
167. "Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."
168. “Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.”
169. »Unless we submit our will to the flooding of life, there is no life in us.«
170. “We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.”
171. “We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time... Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.”
172. “We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”
173. »We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.«
174. »We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away: the body, of course, being the bottle. It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? - or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe, in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.«
175. “We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.”
176. »We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more, neither does the moon. In mystic language, the moon is black to us, and the sun is a sackcloth. Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can't be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.«
177. “We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”
178. “We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do--it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.”
179. »We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and forever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute.«
180. “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.”
181. »What is wrong then? The system. But when you've said that you've said nothing. The system, after all, is only the outcome of the human psyche, the human desires. We shout and blame the machine. But who on earth makes the machine, if we don't? And any alterations in the system are only modifications in the machine. - The system is in us, it is not something external to us. The machine is in us, or it would never come out of us. Well then, there's nothing to blame but ourselves, and there's nothing to change except inside ourselves.«
182. »What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul". Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.«
183. »When ever the feeling of terror came over him, the feeling of being marked-out, branded, a criminal marked out by society, marked-out for annihilation, he pulled himself together, saying to himself: "I am letting them make me feel in the wrong. I am degrading myself by feeling guilty, marked-out, and I have convulsions of fear. - But I am not wrong. I have done no wrong, whatever I have done. That is, no wrong that society has to do with. Whatever wrongs I have done are my own, and private between myself and the other person. - One may be wrong, yes, one is often wrong. But not for them to judge. For my own soul only to judge. - Let me know them for human filth, all these pullers-down, and let me watch them, as I would watch a reeking hyaena, but never fear them. Let me watch them, to keep them at bay. But let me never admit for one single moment that they may be my judges. That, never. I have judged them: they are canaille. I am a man, and I abide by my own soul. Never shall they have a chance of judging me."«
184. ”When I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the wall, The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across, And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas In the window, his body black fur, and the sound of him cross. There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember. Why should I? The running lights And the airy primulas, oblivious Of the impending bee-they were fair enough sights.”
185. “When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”
186. »When we postulate a beginning, we only do so to fix a starting-point for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an end of the universe. The creative mystery, which is life itself, always was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures.«
187. ”Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?”
188. "Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him."
(All quotations by David Herbert Lawrence)
