 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams. |
| The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. |
| 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. |
| The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens. |
| 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. |
| Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff. |
| I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. |
| Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her. |
| One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them. |
| I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets. |
| 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. |
