In every living thing there is the desire for love.
— D. H. Lawrence
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.
Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.
One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
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 novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
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 Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
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.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
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.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People always make war when they say they love peace.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
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 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 essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
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.
The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
God doesn't know things. He is things.
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
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.
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
