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

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

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

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

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

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

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!

I shall always be a priest of love.

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.

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.

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

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

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.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.

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.

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

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

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

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.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

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

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

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

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.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

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.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.

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.

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

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

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.

Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.

God doesn't know things. He is things.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

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

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

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

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.