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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.

-D. H. Lawrence

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Myth Is An Attempt

D. H. Lawrence

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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.

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Love Is Never A Fulfillment. Life Is Never A Thing Of Continuous Bliss. There Is No Paradise. Fight And Laugh And Feel Bitter And Feel Bliss: And Fight Again. Fight, Fight. That Is Life.

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.

And Still I Look For The Men Who Will Dare To Be Roses Of England Wild Roses Of England Men Who Are Wild Roses Of England With Metal Thorns, Beware! But Still More Brave And Still More Rare The Courage Of Rosiness In A Cabbage World Fragrance Of Roses In A Stale Stink Of Lies Rose-leaves To Bewilder The Clever Fools And Rose-briars To Strangle The Machine.

When We Get Out Of The Glass Bottle Of Our Ego ... Things Will Happen To Us So That We Don't Know Ourselves. Cool, Unlying Life Will Rush In.

Why Has Mankind Had Such A Craving To Be Imposed Upon? Why This Lust After Imposing Creeds, Imposing Deeds, Imposing Buildings, Imposing Language, Imposing Works Of Art? The Thing Becomes An Imposition And A Weariness At Last. Give Us Things That Are Alive And Flexible, Which Won't Last Too Long And Become An Obstruction And A Weariness. Even Michelangelo Becomes At Last A Lump And A Burden And A Bore. It Is So Hard To See Past Him.

Whatever Life May Be, And Whatever Horror Men Have Made Of It, The World Is A Lovely Place, A Magic Place, Something To Marvel Over. The World Is An Amazing Place.

When We Get Out Of The Glass Bottles Of Our Ego, And When We Escape Like Squirrels Turning In The Cages Of Our Personality And Get Into The Forests Again, We Shall Shiver With Cold And Fright But Things Will Happen To Us So That We Don't Know Ourselves. Cool, Unlying Life Will Rush In, And Passion Will Make Our Bodies Taut With Power, We Shall Stamp Our Feet With New Power And Old Things Will Fall Down, We Shall Laugh, And Institutions Will Curl Up Like Burnt Paper.

If A Woman Hasn't Got A Tiny Streak Of Harlot In Her, She's A Dry Stick As A Rule.

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

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.

We Are So Conceited And So Unproud.

Never Set A Child Afloat On The Flat Sea Of Life With Only One Sail To Catch The Wind.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

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.

When One Jumps Over The Edge, One Is Bound To Land Somewhere.

But The Act, Called The Sexual Act, Is Not For The Depositing Of Seed. It Is For Leaping Off Into The Unknown, As From A Cliff's Edge, Like Sappho Into The Sea.

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

While The White Man Keeps The Impetus Of His Own Proud, Onward March, The Dark Races Will Yield And Serve, Perforce. But Let The White Man Once Have A Misgiving About His Own Leadership, And The Dark Races Will At Once Attack Him, To Pull Him Down Into The Old Gulfs.

Never Was An Age More Sentimental, More Devoid Of Real Feeling, More Exaggerated In False Feeling, Than Our Own.

It's Not Art For Art's Sake, It's Art For My Sake.

In America The Cohesion Was A Matter Of Choice And Will. But In Europe It Was Organic.

I'd Be Ashamed To See A Woman Walking Around With My Name-label On Her, Address And Railway Station, Like A Wardrobe Trunk.

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

I Always Feel As If I Stood Naked For The Fire Of Almighty God To Go Through Me--and It's Rather An Awful Feeling. One Has To Be So Terribly Religious To Be An Artist.

For Even Satire Is A Form Of Sympathy. It Is The Way Our Sympathy Flows And Recoils That Really Determines Our Lives. And Here Lies The Vast Importance Of The Novel, Properly Handled. It Can Inform And Lead Into New Places Our Sympathy Away In Recoil From Things Gone Dead. Therefore The Novel, Properly Handled, Can Reveal The Most Secret Places Of Life: For It Is The Passional Secret Places Of Life, Above All, That The Tide Of Sensitive Awareness Needs To Ebb And Flow, Cleansing And Freshening.

Now Man Cannot Live Without Some Vision Of Himself. But Still Less Can He Live With A Vision That Is Not True To His Inner Experience And Inner Feeling.

One's Action Ought To Come Out Of An Achieved Stillness: Not To Be A Mere Rushing On.

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.

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.

All Vital Truth Contains The Memory Of All That For Which It Is Not True.

I Love Trying Things And Discovering How I Hate Them.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

The Only Rule Is, Do What You Really, Impulsively, Wish To Do. But Always Act On Your Own Responsibility, Sincerely. And Have The Courage Of Your Own Strong Emotion.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

If You Cut A Thing Up, Of Course It Will Smell. Hence, Nothing Raises Such An Infernal Stink At Last, As Human Psychology.

She Is My First, Great Love. She Was A Wonderful, Rare Woman - You Do Not Know; As Strong, And Steadfast, And Generous As The Sun. She Could Be As Swift As A White Whiplash, And As Kind And Gentle As Warm Rain, And As Steadfast As The Irreducible Earth Beneath Us.

The Great Virtue In Life Is Real Courage That Knows How To Face Facts And Live Beyond Them.

Reach Me A Gentian, Give Me A Torch! Let Me Guide Myself With The Blue, Forked Torch Of This Flower

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

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

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

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

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.

How To Begin To Educate A Child. First Rule: Leave Him Alone. Second Rule: Leave Him Alone. Third Rule: Leave Him Alone. That Is The Whole Beginning.

Our Civilisation Cannot Afford To Let The Censor-moron Loose. The Censor-moron Does Not Really Hate Anything But The Living And Growing Human Consciousness.

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

Mystic Equality Lies In Abstraction, Not In Having Or In Doing, Which Are Processes. In Function And Process, One Man, One Part, Must Of Necessity Be Subordinate To Another. It Is A Condition Of Being.

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.

The Upshot Was, My Paintings Must Burn That English Artists Might Finally Learn.

The Search For Happiness ... Always Ends In The Ghastly Sense Of The Bottomless Nothingness Into Which You Will Inevitably Fall If You Strain Any Further.

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 Only Reality Was Nothingness, And Over It A Hypocrisy Of Words.

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.

Brave People Add Up To An Aristocracy. The Democracy Of Thou-shalt-not Is Bound To Be A Collection Of Weak Men.

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.

There Is No Pornography Without A Secrecy.

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.

What The Eye Doesn't See And The Mind Doesn't Know, Doesn't Exist.

We Are Dying, We Are Dying, We Are All Of Us Dying And Nothing Will Stay The Death-flood Rising Within Us And Soon It Will Rise On The World, On The Outside World.

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

Nobody Can Have The Soul Of Me. My Mother Has Had, And Nobody Can Have It Again. Nobody Can Come Into My Very Self Again, And Breathe Me Like An Atmosphere.

... He Preferred His Own Madness, To The Regular Sanity. He Rejoiced In His Own Madness, He Was Free. He Did Not Want That Old Sanity Of The World, Which Was Become So Repulsive. He Rejoiced In The New-found World Of His Madness. It Was So Fresh And Delicate And So Satisfying.

Sleep Seems To Hammer Out For Me The Logical Conclusions Of My Vague Days, And Offer Them To Me As Dreams.

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.

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.

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.

And Yet - And Yet - One's Kite Will Rise On The Wind As Far As Ever One Has String To Let It Go. It Tugs And Tugs And Will Go, And One Is Glad The Further It Goes, Even If Everybody Else Is Nasty About It.

Every New Stroke Of Civilization Has Cost The Lives Of Countless Brave Men, Who Have Fallen Defeated By The Dragon, In Their Efforts To Win The Apples Of The Hesperides, Or The Fleece Of Gold. Fallen In Their Efforts To Overcome The Old, Half Sordid Savagery Of The Lower Stages Of Creation, And Win The Next Stage.

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

The Real Trouble About Women Is That They Must Always Go On Trying To Adapt Themselves To Men's Theories Of Women, As They Alwayshave Done. When A Woman Is Thoroughly Herself, She Is Being What Her Type Of Man Wants Her To Be. When A Woman Is Hysterical It's Because She Doesn't Quite Know What To Be, Which Pattern To Follow, Which Man's Picture Of Woman To Live Up To.

She Was Always Waiting, It Seemed To Be Her Forte.

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.

And If Tonight My Soul May Find Her Peace In Sleep, And Sink In Good Oblivion, And In The Morning Wake Like A New-opened Flower Then I Have Been Dipped Again In God, And New-created.

Personality And Mind, Like Moustaches, Belong To A Certain Age. They Are A Deformity In A Child.... Leave His Sensibilities, His Emotions, His Spirit, And His Mind Severely Alone. There Is The Devil In Mothers, That They Must Provoke Personalresponse From Their Infants.

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.

I Got The Blues Thinking Of The Future, So I Left Off And Made Some Marmalade. It's Amazing How It Cheers One Up To Shred Orange And Scrub The Floor.

Rippling, Rippling, Rippling, Like A Flapping Overlapping Of Soft Flames, Soft As Feathers, Running To Points Of Brilliance, Exquisite, Exquisite And Melting Her All Molten Inside.

The Essential American Soul Is Hard, Isolate, Stoic, And A Killer. It Has Never Yet Melted.

After All, The World Is Not A Stage-not To Me: Nor A Theatre: Nor A Show-house Of Any Sort. And Art, Especially Novels, Are Not Little Theatres Where The Reader Sits Aloft And Watches...and Sighs, Commiserates, Condones And Smiles. That's What You Want A Book To Be: Because It Leaves You So Safe And Superior, With Your Two-dollar Ticket To The Show. And That's What My Books Are Not And Never Will Be...whoever Reads Me Will Be In The Thick Of The Scrimmage, And If He Doesn't Like It If He Wants A Safe Seat In The Audience-let Him Read Someone Else.

God Is Only A Great Imaginative Experience.

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

It's Bad Taste To Be Wise All The Time, Like Being At A Perpetual Funeral.

Only This Shimmeriness Is The Real Living. The Shape Is A Dead Crust. The Shimmer Is Inside Really.

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

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.

There Are Three Cures For Ennui: Sleep, Drink And Travel.

The Mystery Of The Evening-star Brilliant In Silence And Distance Between The Downward-surging Plunge Of The Sun And The Vast, Hollow Seething Of Inpouring Night. The Magnificence Of The Watchful Morning-star, That Watches Between The Night And The Day, The Gleaming Clue To The Two Opposites.

An Artist Is Only An Ordinary Man With A Greater Potentiality--same Stuff, Same Make Up, Only More Force. And The Strong Driving Force Usually Finds His Weak Spot, And He Goes Cranked, Or Goes Under.

Only At His Maximum Does An Individual Surpass All His Derivative Elements, And Become Purely Himself. And Most People Never Get There. In His Own Pure Individuality A Man Surpasses His Father And Mother, And Is Utterly Unknown To Them.

Try To Find Your Deepest Issue In Every Confusion, And Abide By That.

One Realm We Have Never Conquered: The Pure Present.

One Man Isn't Any Better Than Another, Not Because They Are Equal, But Because They Are Intrinsically Other, That There Is No Termof Comparison.

Is Our Day Of Creative Life Finished? Does There Remain To Us Only The Strange, Awful Afterwards Of The Knowledge In Dissolution,the African Knowledge, But Different For Us, Who Are Blond And Blue-eyed From The North?.... There Was Another Way, The Way Of Freedom. There Was The Paradisal Entry Into Pure, Single Beingwhich Accepted The Obligation Of The Permanent Connection With Others, And With The Other, Submits To The Yoke And Leash Of Love, But Never Forfeits Its Own Proud Individual Singleness, Even While It Loves And Yields.

He Who Gets Nearer The Sun Is Leader, The Aristocrat Of Aristocrats, Or He Who, Like Dostoevsky, Gets Nearest The Moon Of Our Non-being.

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.

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.

The Artist Usually Sets Out -- Or Used To -- To Point A Moral And Adorn A Tale. The Tale, However, Points The Other Way, As A Rule. Two Blankly Opposing Morals, The Artist's And The Tale's. Never Trust The Artist. Trust The Tale. The Proper Functions Of A Critic Is To Save The Tale From The Artist Who Created It.

I Like Relativity And Quantum Theories Because I Don't Understand Them And They Make Me Feel As If Space Shifted About Like A Swan That Can't Settle, Refusing To Sit Still And Be Measured; And As If The Atom Were An Impulsive Thing Always Changing Its Mind.

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.

Softly, In The Dusk, A Woman Is Singing To Me; Taking Me Back Down The Vista Of Years, Till I See A Child Sitting Under The Piano, In The Boom Of The Tingling Strings And Pressing The Small, Poised Feet Of A Mother Who Smiles As She Sings.

Oh, What A Catastrophe, What A Maiming Of Love When It Was Made Personal, Merely Personal Feeling. This Is What Is The Matter With Us: We Are Bleeding At The Roots Because We Are Cut Off From The Earth And Sun And Stars. Love Has Become A Grinning Mockery Because, Poor Blossom, We Plucked It From Its Stem On The Tree Of Life And Expected It To Keep On Blooming In Our Civilized Vase On The Table.

My Soul Is My Great Asset And My Great Misfortune.

If We Had Reverence For Our Life, Our Life Would Take At Once Religious Form. But As It Is, In Our Filthy Irreverence, It Remains A Disgusting Slough, Where Each One Of Us Goes So Thoroughly Disguised In Dirt That We Are All Alike And Indistinguishab

Any Novel Of Importance Has A Purpose. If Only The "purpose" Be Large Enough, And Not At Outs With The Passional Inspiration.

The History Of Our Era Is The Nauseating And Repulsive History Of The Crucifixion Of The Procreative Body For The Glorification Ofthe Spirit.

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

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

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

You Can Have Your Cake And Eat It. But My God, It Will Go Rotten Inside You.

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.

When We Really Want To Go For Something Better, We Shall Smash The Old. Until Then, Any Sort Of Proposal, Or Making Proposals, Is No More Than A Tiresome Game For Self-important People.

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.

[during The Renaissance] The Italians Said, "we Are One In The Father: We Will Go Back." The Northern Races Said, "we Are One In Christ, We Will Go On.

The Deadly Hydra Now Is The Hydra Of Equality. Liberty, Equality And Fraternity Is The Three-fanged Serpent.

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.

What A Frail, Easily Hurt, Rather Pathetic Thing A Human Body Is, Naked; Somehow A Little Unfinished, Incomplete!

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.

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.

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.

The Living Moment Is Everything.

Love Is The Hastening Gravitation Of Spirit Towards Spirit, And Body Towards Body, In The Joy Of Creation.

No Creature Is Fully Itself Till It Is, Like The Dandelion, Opened In The Bloom Of Pure Relationship To The Sun, The Entire Living Cosmos.

It's No Good Trying To Get Rid Of Your Own Aloneness. You've Got To Stick To It All Your Life. Only At Times, At Times, The Gap Will Be Filled In. At Times! But You Have To Wait For The Times. Accept Your Own Aloneness And Stick To It, All Your Life. And Then Accept The Times When The Gap Is Filled In, When They Come. But They've Got To Come. You Can't Force Them.

A House O' Women Is As Dead As A House Wi' No Fire, To My Thinkin'. I'm Not A Spider As Likes To Corner Myself. I Like A Man About, If He's Only Something To Snap At.

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.

Humanity Is Less, Far Less Than The Individual, Because The Individual May Sometimes Be Capable Of Truth, And Humanity Is A Tree Of Lies.

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

Once You Abstract From This, Once You Generalize And Postulate Universals, You Have Departed From The Creative Reality, And Entered The Realm Of Static Fixity, Mechanism, Materialism.

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.

[man's] Life Consists In A Relation With All Things: Stone, Earth, Trees, Flowers, Water, Insects, Fishes, Birds, Creatures, Sun,rainbow, Children, Women, Other Men. But His Greatest And Final Relation Is With The Sun.

A Book Lives As Long As It Is Unfathomed.

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

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

The Cosmos Is A Vast Living Body, Of Which We Are Still Parts. The Sun Is A Great Heart Whose Tremors Run Through Our Smallest Veins. The Moon Is A Great Nerve Center From Which We Quiver Forever. Who Knows The Power That Saturn Has Over Us, Or Venus? But It Is A Vital Power, Rippling Exquisitely Through Us All The Time.

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

At A Wavering Instant The Swallows Gave Way To Bats By The Ponte Vecchio . . . Changing Guard.

For To Desire Is Better Than To Possess, The Finality Of The End Was Dreaded As Deeply As It Was Desired.

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.

Nothing Is As Bad As A Marriage That's A Hopeless Failure.

Be Careful, Then, And Be Gentle About Death. For It Is Hard To Die, It Is Difficult To Go Through The Door, Even When It Opens.

In America The Chief Accusation Seems To Be One Of "eroticism." This Is Odd, Rather Puzzling To My Mind. Which Eros? Eros Of The Jaunty "amours," Or Eros Of The Sacred Mysteries? And If The Latter, Why Accuse, Why Not Respect, Even Venerate?

The Moon Is A White Strange World, Great, White, Soft-seeming Globe In The Night Sky, And What She Actually Communicates To Me Across Space I Shall Never Fully Know. But The Moon That Pulls The Tides, And The Moon That Controls The Menstrual Periods Of Women, And The Moon That Touches The Lunatics, She Is Not The Mere Dead Lump Of The Astronomist. . . . When We Describe The Moon As Dead, We Are Describing The Deadness In Ourselves. When We Find Space So Hideously Void, We Are Describing Our Own Unbearable Emptiness.

Let Man Only Approach His Own Self With A Deep Respect, Even Reverence For All That The Creative Soul, The God-mystery Within Us, Puts Forth. Then We Shall All Be Sound And Free. Lewdness Is Hateful Because It Impairs Our Integrity And Our Proud Being. The Creative, Spontaneous Soul Sends Forth Its Promptings Of Desire And Aspiration In Us. These Promptings Are Our True Fate, Which Is Our Business To Fulfill. A Fate Dictated From Outside, From Theory Or From Circumstance, Is A False Fate.

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

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.

People Always Make War When They Say They Love Peace.

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

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.

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.

The Weakness Of Modern Tragedy[is That] Transgression Against The Social Code Is Made To Bring Destruction, As Though The Social Code Worked Our Irrevocable Fate.

My God, What A Clumsy Olla Putrida James Joyce Is! Nothing But Old Fags And Cabbage Stumps Of Quotations From The Bible And The Rest, Stewed In The Juice Of Deliberate, Journalistic Dirty-mindedness—what Old And Hard-worked Staleness, Masquerading As The All-new!

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

The Modern Pantheist Not Only Sees The God In Everything, He Takes Photographs Of It.

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

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.

Whatever Men You Take, Keep The Idea Of Man Intact: Let Your Soul Wait Whether Your Body Does Or Not.

I Like Australia Less And Less. The Hateful Newness, The Democratic Conceit, Every Man A Little Pope Of Perfection.

The #‎ Cosmos Is A Vast Living Body, Of Which We Are Still Parts.

The Whole Question Of Pornography Seems To Me A Question Of Secrecy. Without Secrecy There Would Be No Pornography. But Secrecy And Modesty Are Two Utterly Different Things. Secrecy Has Always An Element Of Fear In It, Amounting Very Often To Hate. Modesty Is Gentle And Reserved. Today, Modesty Is Thrown To The Winds, Even In The Presence Of The Grey Guardians. But Secrecy Is Hugged, Being A Vice In Itself. And The Attitude Of The Grey Ones Is: Dear Young Ladies, You May Abandon All Modesty, So Long As You Hug Your Dirty Little Secret.

We Have Lost The Art Of Living, And In The Most Important Science Of All, The Science Of Daily Life, The Science Of Behavior, We Are Complete Ignoramuses. We Have Psychology Instead.

To Penetrate Into Italy Is Like A Most Fascinating Act Of Self-discovery-back, Back Down The Old Ways Of Time. Strange And Wonderful Chords Awake In Us, And Vibrate Again After Many Hundreds Of Years Of Complete Forgetfulness.

Whales In Mid-ocean, Suspended In The Waves Of The Sea Great Heaven Of Whales In The Waters, Old Hierarchies. And Enormous Mother Whales Lie Dreaming Suckling Their Whale-tender Young And Dreaming With Strange Whale Eyes Wide Open In The Waters Of The Beginning And The End.

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

My Wife Has A Beastly Habit Of Comparing Poetry -- All Literature In Fact -- To The Droppings Of The Goats Among The Rocks -- Mere Excreta That Fertilises The Ground It Falls On.

You're Always Begging Things To Love You," He Said, "as If You Were A Beggar For Love. Even The Flowers, You Have To Fawn On Them--

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.

Never Trust The Artist. Trust The Tale. The Proper Function Of The Critic Is To Save The Tale From The Artist Who Created It.

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

The Nature Of The Infant Is Not Just A New Permutation-and-combination Of Elements Contained In The Natures Of The Parents. There Is In The Nature Of The Infant That Which Is Utterly Unknown In The Natures Of The Parents.

Beauty Is An Experience, Nothing Else. It Is Not A Fixed Pattern Or An Arrangement Of Features. It Is Something Felt, A Glow Or A Communicated Sense Of Fineness.

I Want The Wonder Back Again, Or I Shall Die.

And It Seems To Me A Blasphemy To Say That The Holy Spirit Is Love. In The Old Testament It Is An Eagle: In The New It Is A Dove.christ Insists On The Dove: But In His Supreme Moments He Includes The Eagle.

Recklessness Is Almost A Man's Revenge On His Woman. He Feels He Is Not Valued So He Will Risk Destroying Himself To Deprive Her Altogether.

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.

The Spanish Wine, My God, It Is Foul, Catpiss Is Champagne Compared, This Is The Sulphurous Urination Of Some Aged Horse.

I Am In Love And, My God, It Is The Greatest Thing That Can Happen To A Man.

Falling In Love

Falling In Love With You

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

A Woman Needn't Be Dragged Down By Her Functions.

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.

Ours Is Essentially A Tragic Age, So We Refuse To Take It Tragically.

There Are Vast Realms Of Consciousness Still Undreamed Of -vast Ranges Of Experience, Like Humming Of Unseen Harps, We Know Nothing Of, Within Us.

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.

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 Human Being Is A Most Curious Creature. He Thinks He Has Got One Soul, And He Has Got Dozens.

As We All Know, Too Much Of Any Divine Thing Is Destruction

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.

I Never Know When I Sit Down, Just What I Am Going To Write. I Make No Plan; It Just Comes, And I Don't Know Where It Comes From.

Literary Criticism Can Be No More Than A Reasoned Account Of The Feeling Produced Upon The Critic By The Book He Is Criticising.

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.

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.

Religion Was Fading Into The Background. He Had Shovelled Away All The Beliefs That Would Hamper Him, Had Cleared The Ground, And Come More Or Less To The Bedrock Of Belief That One Should Feel Inside Oneself For Right Or Wrong, And Should Have The Patience To Gradually Realise One's God. Now Life Interested Him More.

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.

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.

There Is No Evolving, Only Unfolding. The Lily Is In The Bit Of Dust Which Is Its Beginning, Lily And Nothing But Lily: And The Lily In Blossom Is A Ne Plus Ultra: There Is No Evolving Beyond.

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

In The Ancient Recipe, The Three Antidotes For Dullness Or Boredom Are Sleep, Drink, And Travel. It Is Rather Feeble. From Sleep You Wake Up, From Drink You Become Sober, And From Travel You Come Home Again. And Then Where Are You? No, The Two Sovereign Remedies For Dullness Are Love Or A Crusade.

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Roberto Benigni

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