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.

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.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

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.

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

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

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

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 world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

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.

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

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.

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.

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

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.

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.

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

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

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

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

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

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.

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

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

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.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

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.

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.

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

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

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.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

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.

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