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I Believe A Man Is Born First Unto Himself - For The Happy Developing Of Himself, While The World Is A Nursery, And The Pretty Things Are To Be Snatched For, And Pleasant Things Tasted; Some People Seem To Exist Thus Right To The End. But Most Are Born Again On Entering Manhood; Then They Are Born To Humanity, To A Consciousness Of All The Laughing, And The Never-ceasing Murmur Of Pain And Sorrow That Comes From The Terrible Multitudes Of Brothers.

-D. H. Lawrence

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I Believe A Man

D. H. Lawrence

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I Believe A Man Is Born First Unto Himself - For The Happy Developing Of Himself, While The World Is A Nursery, And The Pretty Things Are To Be Snatched For, And Pleasant Things Tasted; Some People Seem To Exist Thus Right To The End. But Most Are Born Again On Entering Manhood; Then They Are Born To Humanity, To A Consciousness Of All The Laughing, And The Never-ceasing Murmur Of Pain And Sorrow That Comes From The Terrible Multitudes Of Brothers.

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Be A Good Animal, True To Your Animal Instincts.

We Do All Like To Get Things Inside A Barb-wire Corral. Especially Our Fellow-men. We Love To Round Them Up Inside The Barb-wire Enclosure Of Freedom, And Make 'em Work. Work, You Free Jewel, Work! Shouts The Liberator, Cracking His Whip.

The Grim Frost Is At Hand, When Apples Will Fall Thick, Almost Thunderous, On The Hardened Earth.

Men Are Free When They Are Obeying Some Deep, Inward Voice Of Religious Belief. Obeying From Within. Men Are Free When They Belong To A Living, Organic, Believing Community, Active In Fulfilling Some Unfulfilled, Perhaps Unrealized Purpose. Not When They Are Escaping To Some Wild West. The Most Unfree Souls Go West, And Shout Of Freedom.

Oh, What A Catastrophe For Man When He Cut Himself Off From The Rhythm Of The Year, From His Unison With The Sun And The Earth. Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was A Personal, Merely Personal Feeling, Taken Away From The Rising And The Setting Of The Sun, And Cut Off From The Magic Connection Of The Solstice And The Equinox!

One Should Be Religious In Everything, Have God, Whatever God Might Be, Present In Everything.

Not I, Not I, But The Wind That Blows Through Me! A Fine Wind Is Blowing The New Direction Of Time.

I Know The Greatness Of Christianity; It Is A Past Greatness.. I Live In 1924, And The Christian Venture Is Done.

Shall I Tell You What You Have That Other Men Don't?.... It's The Courage Of Your Own Tenderness.

I'd Wipe The Machines Off The Face Of The Earth Again, And End The Industrial Epoch Absolutely, Like A Black Mistake.

For My Part, I Prefer My Heart To Be Broken. It Is So Lovely, Dawn-kaleidoscopic Within The Crack.

When Science Starts To Be Interpretive It Is More Unscientific Even Than Mysticism.

The History Of The Cosmos Is The History Of The Struggle Of Becoming. When The Dim Flux Of Unformed Life Struggled, Convulsed Back And Forth Upon Itself, And Broke At Last Into Light And Dark Came Into Existence As Light, Came Into Existence As Cold Shadow Then Every Atom Of The Cosmos Trembled With Delight.

Sanity Means The Wholeness Of The Consciousness. And Our Society Is Only Part Conscious, Like An Idiot.

I Would Like [the Working Man] To Give Me Back Books And Newspapers And Theories. And I Would Like To Give Him Back, In Return, His Old Insouciance, And Rich, Original Spontaneity And Fullness Of Life.

Fullness Of Life

Without Secrecy There Would Be No Pornography. But Secrecy And Modesty Are Two Utterly Different Things.

Most Men Have A Deadness In Them That Frightens Me So Because Of My Own Deadness. Why Can't Men Get Their Life Straight, Like St.mawr, And Then Think? Why Can't They Think Quick, Mother: Quick As A Woman: Only Farther Than We Do?

The World Is A Raving Idiot, And No Man Can Kill It: Though I’ll Do My Best. But You’re Right. We Must Rescue Ourselves As Best We Can.

I Love You, Rotten, Delicious Rottenness. ...wonderful Are The Hellish Experiences, Orphic, Delicate Dionysos Of The Underworld.

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.

Why Were We Driven Out Of Paradise? Why Did We Fall Into This Gnawing Disease Of Unappeasable Dissatisfaction? Not Because We Sinned. Ah, No. All The Animals In Paradise Enjoyed The Sensual Passion Of Coition. Not Because We Sinned. But Because We Got Sex Into Our Head.

Are You Willing To Be Sponged Out, Erased, Cancelled, Made Nothing? Are You Willing To Be Made Nothing? Dipped Into Oblivion? If Not, You Will Never Really Change.

The Essential Function Of Art Is Moral. But A Passionate, Implicit Morality, Not Didactic. A Morality Which Changes The Blood, Rather Than The Mind.

There Is Nothing To Save, Now All Is Lost, But A Tiny Core Of Stillness In The Heart Like The Eye Of A Violet.

There's Always The Hyena Of Morality At The Garden Gate, And The Real Wolf At The End Of The Street.

A Man Was Like A Child With His Appetites. A Woman Had To Yield Him What He Wanted, Or Like A Child He Would Probably Turn Nasty And Flounce Away And Spoil What Was A Very Pleasant Connection.

How Can Any Man Be Free Without A Soul Of His Own, That He Believes In And Won't Sell At Any Price?

Necessary, Forever Necessary, To Burn Out False Shames And Smelt The Heaviest Ore Of The Body Into Purity.

Now The Only Decent Way To Get Something Done Is To Get It Done By Somebody Who Quite Likes Doing It.

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.

Don't Talk To Me Any More About Poetry For Months -- Unless It Is Other Men's Work. I Really Love Verse, Even Rubbish. But I'm Fearfully Busy At A Novel, And Brush All The Gossamer Of Verse Off My Face.

Previously, Even In Egypt, Men Had Not Learned To See Straight. They Fumbled In The Dark, And Didn't Quite Know Where They Were, Or What They Were. Like Men In A Dark Room, They Only Felt Their Existence Surging In The Darkness Of Other Creatures. We, However, Have Learned To See Ourselves For What We Are, As The Sun Sees Us. The Kodak Bears Witness.

God Doesn't Know Things. He Is Things.

It Is No Good Casting Out Devils. They Belong To Us, We Must Accept Them And Be At Peace With Them.

Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out, Especially If You're Married And Her Name's Bertha

Never Trust The Teller, Trust The Tale.

If Only I Am Keen And Hard Like The Sheer Tip Of A Wedge Driven By Invisible Blows, The Rock Will Split, We Shall Come At The Wonder, We Shall Find The Hesperides.

Don't Be Sucked In By The Su-superior, Don't Swallow The Culture Bait, Don't Drink, Don't Drink And Get Beerier And Beerier, Do Learn To Discriminate.

That Is Almost The Whole Of Russian Literature: The Phenomenal Coruscations Of The Souls Of Quite Commonplace People.

Can You Understand How Cruelly I Feel The Lack Of Friends Who Will Believe In Me A Bit?

Sex Is The Root Of Which Intuition Is The Foliage And Beauty Is The Flower.

What's That As Flies Without Wings, Your Ladyship? Time! Time!

Where The Electron Behaves And Misbehaves As It Will, Where The Forces Tie Themselves Up Into Knots Of Atoms And Come United.

Morality In The Novel Is The Trembling Instability Of The Balance. When The Novelist Puts His Thumb In The Scale, To Pull Down The Balance To His Own Predilection, That Is Immorality.

Was His Life Nothing? Had He Nothing To Show, No Work? He Did Not Count His Work, Anyone Could Have Done It. What Had He Known, But The Long, Marital Embrace With His Wife. Curious, That This Was What His Life Amounted To! At Any Rate, It Was Something, It Was Eternal. He Would Say So To Anybody, And Be Proud Of It. He Lay With His Wife In His Arms, And She Was Still His Fulfillment, Just The Same As Ever. And That Was The Be-all And The End-all. Yes, And He Was Proud Of It.

So Long As You Don't Feel Life's Paltry And A Miserable Business, The Rest Doesn't Matter, Happiness Or Unhappiness.

It Is Time That The Protestant Church, The Church Of The Son, Should Be One Again With The Roman Catholic Church, The Church Of The Father. It Is Time That Man Shall Cease, First To Live In The Flesh, With Joy, And Then, Unsatisfied, To Renounce And To Mortify The Flesh.

The Nearer A Conception Comes Towards Finality, The Nearer Does The Dynamic Relation, Out Of Which This Concept Has Arisen, Draw To A Close. To Know Is To Lose.

O Pity The Dead That Are Dead, But Cannot Make The Journey, Still They Moan And Beat Against The Silvery Adamant Walls Of Life's Exclusive City.

I Never Knew How Soothing Trees Are-many Trees And Patches Of Open Sunlight, And Tree Presences; It Is Almost Like Having Another Being.

I Would Rather Sit Still In A State Of Peace On A Stone Than Ride In The Motor-car Of A Multi-millionaire And Feel The Peacelessness Of The Multi-millionaire Poisoning Me.

Life Is Ours To Be Spent, Not To Be Saved.

Sex And A Cocktail: They Both Lasted About As Long, Had The Same Effect, And Amounted To About The Same Thing.

The Cruelest Thing A Man Can Do To A Woman Is To Portray Her As Perfection.

America Does To Me What I Knew It Would Do: It Just Bumps Me. The People Charge At You Like Trucks Coming Down On You -- No Awareness. But One Tries To Dodge Aside In Time. Bump! Bump! Go The Trucks. And That Is Human Contact.

I Want Us To Be Together Without Bothering About Ourselves- To Be Really Together Because We Are Together, As If It Were A Phenomenon, Not A Thing We Have To Maintain By Our Own Effort.

Europe Is, Perhaps, The Least Worn-out Of The Continents, Because It Is The Most Lived In. A Place That Is Lived In Lives.

Museums, Museums, Object-lessons Rigged Out To Illustrate The Unsound Theories Of Archaeologists, Crazy Attempts To Co-ordinate And Get Into A Fixed Order That Which Has No Fixed Order And Will Not Be Co-coordinated! It Is Sickening! Why Must All Experience Be Systematized? A Museum Is Not A First-hand Contact: It Is An Illustrated Lecture. And What One Wants Is The Actual Vital Touch.

You're Spending Your Life Without Renewing It. You've Got To Be Amused, Properly Healthily Amused. You're Spending Your Vitality Without Making Any. Can't Go On You Know. Depression! Avoid Depression!

The Source Of All Life And Knowledge Is In #‎ Man And #‎ Woman , And The Source Of All Living Is In The Interchange And The Meeting And Mingling Of These Two: Man-life And Woman-life, Man-knowledge And Woman-knowledge , Man-being And Woman-being.

Marriage Is The Clue To Human Life, But There Is No Marriage Apart From The Wheeling Sun And The Nodding Earth, From The Strayingof The Planets And The Magnificence Of The Fixed Stars.

The Past. The Golden Age Of The Past. What A Nostalgia We All Feel For It. Yet We Don't Want It When We Get It. Try The South Seas.

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 Think New Mexico Was The Greatest Experience From The Outside World That I Have Ever Had.

Every Profound New Movement Makes A Great Swing Also Backwards To Some Older, Half-forgotten Way Of Consciousness.

I Am Part Of The Sun As My Eye Is Part Of Me. That I Am Part Of The Earth My Feet Know Perfectly, And My Blood Is Part Of The Sea. There Is Not Any Part Of Me That Is Alone And Absolute Except My Mind, And We Shall Find That The Mind Has No Existence By Itself, It Is Only The Glitter Of The Sun On The Surfaces Of The Water.

If Only We Could Live Two Lives: The First In Which To Make One's Mistakes, And The Second In Which To Profit By Them.

Man Has Little Needs And Deeper Needs. We Have Fallen Into The Mistake Of Living From Our Little Needs Till We Have Almost Lost Our Deeper Needs In A Sort Of Madness.

Sleep Is Still Most Perfect, In Spite Of Hygienists, When It Is Shared With A Beloved. The Warmth, The Security And Peace Of Soul, The Utter Comfort From The Touch Of The Other, Knits The Sleep, So That It Takes The Body And Soul Completely In Its Healing.

Creatures That Hang Themselves Up Like An Old Rag, To Sleep; And Disgustingly Upside Down. Hanging Upside Down Like Rows Of Disgusting Old Rags And Grinning In Their Sleep. Bats!

Pure Morality Is Only An Instinctive Adjustment Which The Soul Makes.

And All The Time She Felt The Reflection Of His Hopelessness In Her. She Couldn't Quite, Quite Love In Hoplessness. And He, Being Hopeless, Couldn't Ever Love At All.

For {she} Had Adopted The Standard Of The Young: What There Was In The Moment Was Everything. And Moments Followed One Another Without Necessarily Belonging To One Another.

Night, In Which Everything Was Lost, Went Reaching Out, Beyond Stars And Sun. Stars And Sun, A Few Bright Grains, Went Spiraling Round For Terror, And Holding Each Other In Embrace, There In A Darkness That Outpassed Them All, And Left Them Tiny And Daunted. So Much, And Himself, Infinitesimal, At The Core Of Nothingness, And Yet Not Nothing.

At The Back Of My Life's Horizon, Where The Dreamings Of Past Lives Crowd.

Do Come Back And Draw The Ferrets, They Are The Most Lovely Noble Darlings In The World.

Do Not Allow To Slip Away From You Freedoms The People Who Came Before You Won With Such Hard Knocks.

The Goal Is To Know How Not-to-know.

We Are So Conceited And So Unproud.

Nobody Knows You. You Don't Know Yourself. And I, Who Am Half In Love With You, What Am I In Love With? My Own Imaginings?

She Knew That The Horse, Born To Serve Nobly, Had Waited In Vain For Someone Noble To Serve. His Spirit Knew That Nobility Had Gone Out Of Men.

That Is Your Trick, Your Bit Of Filthy Magic: Invisibility, And The Anaesthetic Power To Deaden My Attention In Your Direction.

You Must Always Be A-waggle With Love.

A Little Morphine In All The Air. It Would Be Wonderfully Refreshing For Everyone.

Patience! Patience! The World Is A Vast And Ghastly Intricacy Of Mechanism, And One Has To Be Very Wary, Not To Get Mangled By It.

Homer Was Wrong In Saying, "would That Strife Might Pass Away From Among Gods And Men!" He Did Not See That He Was Praying For The Destruction Of The Universe.

Sex Is Just Another Form Of Talk, Where You Act The Words Instead Of Saying Them.

Art Is A Form Of Supremely Delicate Awareness And Atonement — Meaning Atoneness, The State Of Being At One With The Object.

I Hold That The Parentheses Are By Far The Most Important Parts Of A Non-business Letter.

One Never Can Know The Whys And The Wherefores Of One's Passional Changes.

It's Hard To Ravish A Tin Of Sardines.

No Form Of Love Is Wrong, So Long As It Is Love, And You Yourself Honour What You Are Doing. Love Has An Extraordinary Variety Of Forms! And That Is All There Is In Life, It Seems To Me. But I Grant You, If You Deny The Variety Of Love You Deny Love Altogether. If You Try To Specialize Love Into One Set Of Accepted Feelings, You Wound The Very Soul Of Love. Love Must Be Multi-form, Else It Is Just Tyranny, Just Death

One Must Learn To Love, And Go Through A Good Deal Of Suffering To Get To It, Like Any Knight Of The Grail, And The Journey Is Always Towards The Other Soul, Not Away From It. . . . To Love You Have To Learn To Understand The Other, More Than She Understands Herself, And To Submit To Her Understanding Of You. It Is Damnably Difficult And Painful, But It Is The Only Thing Which Endures.

Those That Go Searching For Love Only Make Manifest Their Own Lovelessness, And The Loveless Never Find Love, Only The Loving Find Love, And They Never Have To Seek For It.

When I Went To The Scientific Doctor I Realised What A Lust There Was In Him To Wreak His So-called Science On Me And Reduce Me To The Level Of A Thing. So I Said: Good-morning! And Left Him.

I've Never Seen A Wild Thing Feel Sorry For Itself.

Death Is The Only Pure, Beautiful Conclusion Of A Great Passion.

An Illusion Which Is A Real Experience Is Worth Having.

I Should Like [people] To Like The Purely Individual Thing In Themselves, Which Makes Them Act In Singleness. And They Only Like To Do The Collective Thing.

It Seems To Me Absolutely True, That Our World, Which Appears To Us The Surface Of All Things, Is Really The Bottom Of A Deep Ocean: All Our Trees Are Submarine Growths, And We Are Weird, Scaly-clad Submarine Fauna, Feeding Ourselves On Offal Like Shrimps. Only Occasionally The Soul Rises Gasping Through The Fathomless Fathoms Under Which We Live, Far Up To The Surface Of The Ether, Where There Is True Air.

For, Of Course, Being A Girl, One’s Whole Dignity And Meaning In Life Consisted In The Achievement Of An Absolute, A Perfect, A Pure And Noble Freedom. What Else Did A Girl’s Life Mean?

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.

You Don't Learn Algebra With Your Blessed Soul. Can't You Look At It With Your Clear Simple Wits?

You Must Drop All Your Democracy. You Must Not Believe In ''the People.'' One Class Is No Better Than Another. It Must Be A Case Of Wisdom, Or Truth. Let The Working Classes Be Working Classes. That Is The Truth. There Must Be An Aristocracy Of People Who Have Wisdom, And There Must Be A Ruler: A Kaiser: No Presidents And Democracies.

Freedom Is A Very Great Reality, But It Means Above All Things, Freedom From Lies.

Every Civilization When It Loses Its Inner Vision And Its Cleaner Energy, Falls Into A New Sort Of Sordidness, More Vast And More Stupendous Than The Old Savage Sort. An Augean Stable Of Metallic Filth.

I Want To Live My Life So That My Nights Are Not Full Of Regrets.

Obscenity Only Comes In When The Mind Despises And Fears The Body, And The Body Hates And Resists The Mind.

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

The Reaction To Any Word May Be, In An Individual, Either A Mob-reaction Or An Individual Reaction. It Is Up To The Individual To Ask Himself: Is My Reaction Individual, Or Am I Merely Reacting From My Mob-self? When It Comes To The So-called Obscene Words, I Should Say That Hardly One Person In A Million Escapes Mob-reaction.

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.

He Always Ran Away From The Battle With Himself. Even In His Own Heart's Privacy, He Excused Himself, Saying, "if She Hadn't Said So-and-so, It Would Never Have Happened.

I Am Convinced That The Air We Normally Breathe Is A Kind Of Water, And Men And Women Are A Species Of Fish.

We Ought To Dance With Rapture That We Should Be Alive And In The Flesh, And Part Of The Living, Incarnate Cosmos.

The Novel Is The Highest Form Of Human Expression So Far Attained. Why? Because It Is So Incapable Of The Absolute.

In Every Great Novel, Who Is The Hero All The Time? Not Any Of The Characters, But Some Unnamed And Nameless Flame Behind Them All.

We Have To Hate Our Immediate Predecessors, To Get Free From Their Authority.

The More I Live, The More I Realize What Strange Creatures Human Beings Are. Some Of Them Might Just As Well Have A Hundred Legs, Like A Centipede, Or Six, Like A Lobster. The Human Consistency And Dignity One Has Been Led To Expect From One's Fellow-man Seem Actually Non-existent. One Doubts If They Exist To Any Startling Degree Even In Oneself.

No Absolute Is Going To Make The Lion Lie Down With The Lamb: Unless The Lamb Is Inside.

When Love Enters, The Whole Spiritual Constitution Of A Man Changes, Is Filled With The Holy Ghost, And Almost His Form Is Altered.

The Human Soul Needs Actual Beauty Even More Than Bread.

With A Woman, A Man Always Wants To Let Himself Go. And It Is Precisely With A Woman That He Should Never Let Himself Go ... But Stick To His Innermost Belief And Meet Her Just There.

They Lived Freely Among The Students, They Argued With The Men Over Philosophical, Sociological And Artistic Matters, They Were Just As Good As The Men Themselves: Only Better, Since They Were Women.

To The Puritan All Things Are Impure, As Somebody Says.

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.

Ethics And Equity And The Principles Of Justice Do Not Change With The Calendar.

Ethical Principles

I Believe That There Was A Great Age, A Great Epoch When Man Did Not Make War: Previous To 2000 B.c. Then The Self Had Not Reallybecome Aware Of Itself, It Had Not Separated Itself Off, The Spirit Was Not Yet Born, So There Was No Internal Conflict, And Hence No Permanent External Conflict.

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 Poisons You When You've Got It, And Starves You When You Haven't.

Build Then The Ship Of Death, For You Must Take The Longest Journey, To Oblivion.

There Is The Unknown And The Unknowable Which Propounds All Creation. This We Cannot Love , We Can Only Accept It As A Term Of Our Own Limitation And Ratification. We Can Only Know That From The Unknown, Profound Desires Enter In Upon Us, And That The Fulfilling Of These Desires Is The Fulfilling Of Creation.

Sleep Is Still Most Perfect, In Spite Of Hygienists, When It Is Shared With A Beloved.

I'll Do My Life Work, Sticking Up For The Love Between Man And Woman.

I Cannot Be A Materialist - But Oh, How Is It Possible That A God Who Speaks To All Hearts Can Let Belgravia Go Laughing To A Vicious Luxury, And Whitechapel Cursing To A Filthy Debauchery - Such Suffering, Such Dreadful Suffering - And Shall The Short Years Of Christ's Mission Atone For It All?

Let There Be An End ... Of All This Welter Of Pity, Which Is Only Self-pity Reflected Onto Some Obvious Surface.

You Can't Insure Against The Future, Except By Really Believing In The Best Bit Of You, And In The Power Beyond It.

Men Live In Glad Obedience To The Masters They Believe In, Or They Live In A Frictional Opposition To The Master They Wish To Undermine.

Aren't I Enough For You?' She Asked. 'no,' He Said. 'you Are Enough For Me, As Far As A Woman Is Concerned. You Are All Women To Me. But I Wanted A Man Friend, As Eternal As You And I Are Eternal.' (women In Love)

The Spirit Of The Place Is A Strange Thing. Our Mechanical Age Tries To Override It. But It Does Not Succeed. In The End The Strange, Sinister Spirit Of The Place, So Diverse And Adverse In Differing Places, Will Smash Our Mechanical Oneness Into Smithereens.

She Looked At Him, And Oh, The Weariness To Her, Of The Effort To Understand Another Language, The Weariness Of Hearing Him, Attending To Him, Making Out Who He Was, As He Stood There Fair-bearded And Alien, Looking At Her. She Knew Something Of Him, Of His Eyes. But She Could Not Grasp Him. She Closed Her Eyes.

But Then Peace, Peace! I Am So Mistrustful Of It: So Much Afraid That It Means A Sort Of Weakness And Giving In.

I Prefer Unlucky Things. Luck Is Vulgar. Who Wants What Luck Would Bring? I Don't.

Only The Desert Has A Fascination--to Ride Alone--in The Sun In The Forever Unpossessed Country--away From Man. That Is A Great Temptation.

Since Obscenity Is The Truth Of Our Passion Today, It Is The Only Stuff Of Art -- Or Almost The Only Stuff.

And That Is ... How They Are. So Terribly Physically All Over One Another. They Pour Themselves One Over The Other Like So Much Melted Butter Over Parsnips. They Catch Each Other Under The Chin, With A Tender Caress Of The Hand, And They Smile With Sunny Melting Tenderness Into Each Other's Face.

For Man, The Vast Marvel Is To Be Alive. For Man, As For Flower And Beast And Bird, The Supreme Triumph Is To Be Most Vividly, Most Perfectly Alive. Whatever The Unborn May Know, They Cannot Know The Beauty, The Marvel Of Being Alive In The Flesh. The Dead May Look After The Afterwards. But The Magnificent Here And Now Of Life In The Flesh Is Ours, And Ours Alone, And Ours Only For A Time.

When Van Gogh Paints Sunflowers, He Reveals, Or Achieves, The Vivid Relation Between Himself, As Man, And The Sunflower, As Sunflower, At That Quick Moment Of Time. His Painting Does Not Represent The Sunflower Itself. We Shall Never Know What The Sunflower Itself Is. And The Camera Will Visualize The Sunflower Far More Perfectly Than Van Gogh Can.

Sex Is Our Deepest Form Of Consciousness. It Is Utterly Non-ideal, Non-mental. It Is Pure Blood-consciousness.... It Is The Consciousness Of The Night, When The Soul Is Almost Asleep.

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.

We Must Know, If Only In Order To Learn Not To Know. The Supreme Lesson Of Human Consciousness Is To Learn How Not To Know. That Is, How Not To Interfere.

That's It! When You Come To Know Men, That's How They Are: Too Sensitive In The Wrong Place.

Men Are Freest When They Are Most Unconscious Of Freedom. The Shout Is A Rattling Of Chains, Always Was.

Chains That Bind

But Having More Freedom She Only Became More Profoundly Aware Of The Big Want. She Wanted So Many Things. She Wanted To Read Great, Beautiful Books, And Be Rich With Them; She Wanted To See Beautiful Things, And Have The Joy Of Them For Ever; She Wanted To Know Big, Free People; And There Remained Always The Want She Could Put No Name To? It Was So Difficult. There Were So Many Things, So Much To Meet And Surpass. And One Never Knew Where One Was Going.

The Great Home Of The Soul Is The Open Road.

This Is What I Believe: That I Am I. That My Soul Is A Dark Forest. That My Known Self Will Never Be More Than A Little Clearing In The Forest. That Gods, Strange Gods, Come Forth From The Forest Into The Clearing Of My Known Self, And Then Go Back. That I Must Have The Courage To Let Them Come And Go. That I Will Never Let Mankind Put Anything Over Me, But That I Will Try Always To Recognize And Submit To The Gods In Me And The Gods In Other Men And Women. There Is My Creed.

Water Is H2o, Hydrogen Two Parts, Oxygen One, But There Is Also A Third Thing, That Makes It Water And Nobody Knows What That Is.

So Slowly The Hot Elephant Hearts Grow Full Of Desire, And The Great Beasts Mate In Secret At Last, Hiding Their Fire.

I Am A Man And Alive. For This Reason I Am A Novelist. And, Being A Novelist, I Consider Myself Superior To The Saint, Te Scientist, The Philosopher, And The Poet, Who Are All Great Masters Of Different Bits Of Man Alive, But Never Get The Whole Hog....only In The Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

The Mind Has No Existence By Itself; It Is Only The Glitter Of The Sun On The Surface Of The Waters.

They Say The Sea Is Cold, But The Sea Contains The Hottest Blood Of All, And The Wildest, The Most Urgent.

A Woman Unsatisfied Must Have Luxuries. But A Woman Who Loves A Man Would Sleep On A Board

All This Americanising And Mechanising Has Been For The Purpose Of Overthrowing The Past. And Now Look At America, Tangled In Her Own Barbed Wire, And Mastered By Her Own Machines.

He Felt He Had Lost It For Good, He Knew What It Was To Have Been In Communication With Her, And To Be Cast Off Again. In Misery, His Heart Like A Heavy Stone, He Went About Unliving.

A Museum Is Not A First-hand Contact: It Is An Illustrated Lecture. And What One Wants Is The Actual Vital Touch.

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.

I Have Lived Among Enough Painters And Around Studios To Have Had All The Theories - And How Contradictory They Are - Rammed Down My Throat. A Man Has To Have A Gizzard Like An Ostrich To Digest All The Brass-tacks And Wire Nails Of Modern Art Theories.

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.

I Am Turned Into A Dream. I Feel Nothing, Or I Don't Know What I Feel. Yet It Seems To Me I Am Happy.

If I Were The Moon, I Know Where I Would Fall Down.

The Only Principle I Can See In This Life, Is That One Must Forfeit The Less For The Greater.

Go Deeper Than Love, For The Soul Has Greater Depths, Love Is Like The Grass, But The Heart Is Deep Wild Rock Molten, Yet Dense And Permanent.

You Will Not Easily Get A Man To Believe That His Carnal Love For The Woman He Has Made His Wife Is As High A Love As That He Feltfor His Mother Or Sister.

And Every True Artist Is The Salvation Of Every Other. But Only Artists Produce For Each Other The World That Is Fit To Live In.

The Moon! Artemis! The Great Goddess Of The Splendid Past Of Men! Are You Going To Tell Me She Is A Dead Lump?

For Whereas The Mind Works In Possibilities, The Intuitions Work In Actualities, And What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You. Whereas What You Mentally Or "consciously" Desire Is Nine Times Out Of Ten Impossible; Hitch Your Wagon To A Star, Or You Will Just Stay Where You Are.

There Is No Smooth Road Into The Future: But We Go Round, Or Scramble Over The Obstacles.

She Had Borne So Long The Cruelty Of Belonging To Him And Not Being Claimed By Him.

Poe Tried Alcohol, And Any Drug He Could Lay His Hands On. He Also Tried Any Human Being He Could Lay His Hands On.

The Map Appears To Us More Real Than The Land.

Democracy And Equality Try To Denythe Mystic Recognition Of Difference And Innate Priority, The Joy Of Obedience And The Sacred Responsibility Of Authority.

Be Still When You Have Nothing To Say; When Genuine Passion Moves You, Say What You've Got To Say, And Say It Hot.

It Is All A Question Of Sensitiveness. Brute Force And Overbearing May Make A Terrific Effect. But In The End, That Which Lives By Delicate Sensitiveness. If It Were A Question Of Brute Force, Not A Single Human Baby Would Survive For A Fortnight. It Is The Grass Of The Field, Most Frail Of All Things, That Supports All Life All The Time. But For The Green Grass, No Empire Would Rise, No Man Would Eat Bread: For Grain Is Grass; And Hercules Or Napoleon Or Henry Ford Would Alike Be Denied Existence.

When Man Has Nothing But His Will To Assert--even His Good-will--it Is Always Bullying. Bolshevism Is One Sort Of Bullying, Capitalism Another: And Liberty Is A Change Of Chains.

For Man, As For Flower And Beast And Bird, The Supreme Triumph Is To Be Most Vividly, Most Perfectly Alive.

A Snake Came To My Water Trough On A Hot, Hot Day, And I In Pajamas For The Heat, To Drink There.

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is Especially The Male Of The Species

In The End, For Congenial Sympathy, For Poetry, For Work, For Original Feeling And Expression, For Perfect Companionship With One's Friends--give Me The Country.

You Live By What You Thrill To, And There's The End Of It.

And Venus Among The Fishes Skips And Is A She-dolphin She Is The Gay, Delighted Porpoise Sporting With Love And The Sea She Is The Female Tunny-fish, Round And Happy Among The Males And Dense With Happy Blood, Dark Rainbow Bliss In The Sea.

No Form Of Love Is Wrong, So Long As It Is Love, And You Yourself Honour What You Are Doing. Love Has An Extraordinary Variety Of Forms! And That Is All That There Is In Life, It Seems To Me.

I'm Not Sure If A Mental Relation With A Woman Doesn't Make It Impossible To Love Her. To Know The Mind Of A Woman Is To End In Hating Her. Love Means The Pre-cognitive Flow...it Is The Honest State Before The Apple.

Go Deeper Than Love, For The Soul Has Greater Depths, Love Is Like The Grass, But The Heart Is Deep Wild Rock Molten, Yet Dense And Permanent. Go Down To Your Deep Old Heart, And Lose Sight Of Yourself. And Lose Sight Of Me, The Me Whom You Turbulently Loved. Let Us Lose Sight Of Ourselves, And Break The Mirrors. For The Fierce Curve Of Our Lives Is Moving Again To The Depths Out Of Sight, In The Deep Living Heart.

Their Whole Life Depends On Spending Money, And Now They’ve Got None To Spend. That’s Our Civilization And Our Education: Bring Up The Masses To Depend Entirely On Spending Money, And Then The Money Gives Out.

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.

If We Sip The Wine, We Find Dreams Coming Upon Us Out Of The Imminent Night

It's Terrible, Once You've Got A Man Into Your Blood!" She Said.

Anatomy Presupposes A Corpse; Psychology Presupposes A World Of Corpses.

Now It Is Autumn And The Falling Fruit And The Long Journey Towards Oblivion. The Apples Falling Like Great Drops Of Dew To Bruise Themselves An Exit From Themselves.

One Might Talk About The Sanity Of The Atom The Sanity Of Space The Sanity Of The Electron The Sanity Of Water- For It Is All Alive And Has Something Comparable To That Which We Call Sanity In Ourselves. The Only Oneness Is The Oneness Of Sanity.

It Was As If Thousands And Thousands Of Little Roots And Threads Of Consciousness In Him And Her Had Grown Together Into A Tangled Mass, Till They Could Crowd No More, And The Plant Was Dying. Now Quietly, Subtly, She Was Unravelling The Tangle Of His Consciousness And Hers, Breaking The Threads Gently, One By One, With Patience And Impatience To Get Clear.

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Gerard Depardieu

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