The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
— D. H. Lawrence
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.
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.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
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!
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.
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
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.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
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.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
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.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
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.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
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 always be a priest of love.
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
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.
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.
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.
Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
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 great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
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 sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
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.
My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.
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.
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
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 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.
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.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
