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.
D. H. Lawrence
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
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.
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.
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.
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
In every living thing there is the desire for love.
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
People always make war when they say they love peace.
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
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.
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
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.
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.
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.
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.
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.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
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.
I shall always be a priest of love.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
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.
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.
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
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.
