 There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street. |
| 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. |
| For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. |
| 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. |
| Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts. |
| 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. |
| I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps. |
| 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 Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man. |
| The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more. |
| 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. |
| Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad. |
| Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth. |
| 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. |
| The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment. |
| It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral. |
| They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates. |
| How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression. |
| Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life. |
| The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute. |
