Daily Digest

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”

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

“What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.”

“The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.”

“It is our business to go as we are impelled.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself”

“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.”

“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.”

“Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.”

“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.”

“Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”

“Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.”

“Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.”

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.”

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”

“So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.”

“There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.”

“It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.”

“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 great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.”

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

“When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be”