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The Whole Life-effort Of Man Is To Get His Life Into Direct Contact With The Elemental Life Of The Cosmos, Mountain Life, Cloud Life, Thunder Life, Air Life, Earth Life, Sun Life. To Come Into Immediate Felt Contact, And So Derive Energy, Power And A Dark Sort Of Joy. This Effort Into Sheer Naked Contact, Without An Intermediary Or Mediator Is The Root Meaning Of Religion.

-D. H. Lawrence

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The Whole Life-effort Of

D. H. Lawrence

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The Whole Life-effort Of Man Is To Get His Life Into Direct Contact With The Elemental Life Of The Cosmos, Mountain Life, Cloud Life, Thunder Life, Air Life, Earth Life, Sun Life. To Come Into Immediate Felt Contact, And So Derive Energy, Power And A Dark Sort Of Joy. This Effort Into Sheer Naked Contact, Without An Intermediary Or Mediator Is The Root Meaning Of Religion.

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He Had Made A Passionate Study Of Education, Only To Come, Gradually, To The Knowledge That Education Is Nothing But The Process Of Building Up, Gradually, A Complete Unit Of Consciousness. And Each Unit Of Consciousness Is The Living Unit Of That Great Social, Religious, Philosophic Idea Towards Which Humankind, Like An Organism Seeking Its Final Form, Is Laboriously Growing.

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.

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

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.

The Soul Is A Very Perfect Judge Of Her Own Motions, If Your Mind Doesn't Dictate To Her.

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--

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.

Love's A Dog In A Manger.

I Am Sure No Other Civilization, Not Even The Romans, Has Showed Such A Vast Proportion Of Ignominious And Degraded Nudity, And Ugly, Squalid Dirty Sex. Because No Other Civilization Has Driven Sex Into The Underworld, And Nudity To The W.c.

The Man Who Had Died Looked Nakedly On Life, And Saw A Vast Resoluteness Everywhere Flinging Itself Up In Stormy Or Subtle Wave-crests.... Always The Man Who Had Died Saw Not The Bird Alone, But The Short, Sharp Wave Of Life Of Which The Bird Was The Crest.

Brute Force Crushes Many Plants. Yet The Plants Rise Again. The Pyramids Will Not Last A Moment Compared With The Daisy. And Before Buddha Or Jesus Spoke The Nightingale Sang, And Long After The Words Of Jesus And Buddha Are Gone Into Oblivion The Nightingale Still Will Sing. Because It Is Neither Preaching Nor Commanding Nor Urging. It Is Just Singing. And In The Beginning It Was Not A Word, But A Chirrup.

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.

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination.

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

There Is No Pornography Without A Secrecy.

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.

I Have A Very Great Fear Of Love. It Is So Personal. Let Each Bird Fly With Its Own Wings, And Each Fish Swim Its Own Course.--morning Brings More Than Love. And I Want To Be True To The Morning.

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

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.

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.

Comes Over One An Absolute Necessity To Move. And What Is More, To Move In Some Particular Direction. A Double Necessity Then: To Get On The Move, And To Know Whither.

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.

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

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 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.

An Illusion Which Is A Real Experience Is Worth Having.

If I Take My Whole, Passionate, Spiritual And Physical Love To The Woman Who In Return Loves Me, That Is How I Serve God. And My Hymn And My Game Of Joy Is My Work.

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

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

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

If It Doesn't Absorb You, If It Isn't Any Fun, Don't Do It.

The World Is Wonderful And Beautiful And Good Beyond One's Wildest Imagination. Never, Never, Never Could One Conceive What Love Is, Beforehand, Never. Life Can Be Great-quite God-like. It Can Be So. God Be Thanked I Have Proved It.

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.

There's Nothing Wrong With Sexual Feelings In Themselves, So Long As They Are Straightforward And Not Sneaking Or Sly. The Right Sort Of Sex Stimulus Is Invaluable To Human Daily Life. Without It The World Grows Grey.

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

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

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.

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.

I See A Redness Suddenly Come Into The Evening's Anxious Breast-- 'tis The Wound Of Love Goes Home!

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?

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

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.

You'll Never Succeed In Idealizing Hard Work. Before You Can Dig Mother Earth You've Got To Take Off Your Ideal Jacket. The Harder A Man Works, At Brute Labor, The Thinner Becomes His Idealism, The Darker His Mind.

Literature Is A Toil And A Snare, A Curse That Bites Deep.

And Woman Is The Same As Horses: Two Wills Act In Opposition Inside Her. With One Will She Wants To Subject Herself Utterly. With The Other She Wants To Bolt, And Pitch Her Rider To Perdition.

Give Up Bearing Children And Bear Hope And Love And Devotion To Those Already Born.

But That Is How Men Are! Ungrateful And Never Satisfied. When You Don't Have Them They Hate You Because You Won't; And When You Do Have Them They Hate You Again, For Some Other Reason. Or For No Reason At All, Except That They Are Discontented Children, And Can't Be Satisfied Whatever They Get, Let A Woman Do What She May.

Sight Is The Least Sensual Of All The Senses. And We Strain Ourselves To See, See, See--everything, Everything Through The Eye, Inone Mode Of Objective Curiosity.

My God, These Folks Don't Know How To Love - That's Why They Love So Easily.

I Love Trying Things And Discovering How I Hate Them.

Life And Love Are Life And Love, A Bunch Of Violets Is A Bunch Of Violets, And To Drag In The Idea Of A Point Is To Ruin Everything. Live And Let Live, Love And Let Love, Flower And Fade, And Follow The Natural Curve, Which Flows On, Pointless.

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.

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

You Feel Free In Australia. There Is Great Relief In The Atmosphere - A Relief From Tension, From Pressure, An Absence Of Control Of Will Or Form. The Skies Open Above You And The Areas Open Around You.

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

When The Emotional Soul Receives A Wounding Shock, The Soul Seems To Recover As The Body Recovers. But This Is Only In Appearance. Slowly, Slowly The Wound To The Soul Begins To Make Itself Felt, Like A Bruise, Which Only Slowly Deepens Its Terrible Ache, Till It Fills All The Psyche. And When We Think We Have Recovered And Forgotten, It Is Then That The Terrible After-effects Have To Be Encountered At Their Worst.

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

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

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

One Should Stick By One's Soul, And By Nothing Else. In One's Soul, One Knows The Truth From The Untruth, And Life From Death. And If One Betrays One's Own Soul-knowledge One Is The Worst Of Traitors.

Not That The Red Indian Will Ever Possess The Broad Lands Of America. At Least I Presume Not. But His Ghost Will.

Native American

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

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.

You Have To Have Something Vicious In You To Be A Creative Writersomething Old-adamish, Incompatible To The "ordinary World.

Oh The Innocent Girl In Her Maiden Teens Knows Perfectly Well What Everything Means.

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

And That Is How We Are. By Strength Of Will We Cut Off Our Inner Intuitive Knowledge From Admitted Consciousness. This Causes A State Of Dread, Or Apprehension, Which Makes The Blow Ten Times Worse When It Does Fall.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss. There Is No Reciprocity. There Is Merely The Spending Away Of A Certain Force, And No Return. The Body Remains, In A Sense, A Corpse, After The Act Of Self-abuse. There Is No Change, Only Deadening. There Is What We Call Dead Loss. And This Is Not The Case In Any Act Of Sexual Intercourse Between Two People. Two People May Destroy One Another In Sex. But They Cannot Just Produce The Null Effect Of Masturbation.

The World Fears A New Experience More Than It Fears Anything. Because A New Experience Displaces So Many Old Experiences. . . . The World Doesn't Fear A New Idea. It Can Pigeon-hole Any Idea. But It Can't Pigeon-hole A Real New Experience.

New Experiences

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

If It Be Not True To Me, What Care I How True It Be.. Though It Be Not True To Thee, It's Gay And Gospel Truth To Me.

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

Life Is Beautiful, As Long As It Consumes You. When It Is Rushing Through You, Destroying You, Life Is Gorgeous, Glorious. It's When You Burn A Slow Fire And Save Fuel, That Life's Not Worth Having.

Human Love, Human Trust, Are Always Perilous, Because They Break Down. The Greater The Love, The Greater The Trust, And The Greater The Peril, The Greater The Disaster. Because To Place Absolute Trust On Another Human Being Is In Itself A Disaster, Both Ways, Since Each Human Being Is A Ship That Must Sail Its Own Course, Even If It Go In Company With Another Ship.... And Yet, Love Is The Greatest Thing Between Human Beings.

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!

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

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve It, Or Be Torn To Bits, Is The Decree.

Men And Women Aren't Really Dogs: They Only Look Like It And Behave Like It. Somewhere Inside There Is A Great Chagrin And A Gnawing Discontent.

The Words Themselves Are Clean, So Are The Things To Which They Apply. But The Mind Drags In A Filthy Association, Calls Up Some Repulsive Emotion. Well, Then, Cleanse The Mind, That Is The Real Job. It Is The Mind Which Is The Augean Stables, Not Language.

Nothing That Comes From The Deep, Passional Soul Is Bad, Or Can Be Bad.

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.

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." "and They Rock, And They Rock, Through The Sensual Ageless Ages On The Depths Of The Seven Seas, And Through The Salt They Reel With Drunken Delight And In The Tropics Tremble They With Love And Roll With Massive, Strong Desire, Like Gods.

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

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.

A Man And A Woman Are New To One Another Throughout A Life-time, In The Rhythm Of Marriage That Matches The Rhythm Of The Year. Sex Is The Balance Of Male And Female In The Universe, The Attraction, The Repulsion, The Transit Of Neutrality, The New Attraction, The Repulsion, Always Different, Always New.

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 Should Think The American Admiration Of Five-minute Tourists Has Done More To Kill The Sacredness Of Old European Beauty And Aspiration Than Multitudes Of Bombs Would Have Done.

When Passion Is Dead, Or Absent, Then The Magnificent Throb Of Beauty Is Incomprehensible And Even A Little Despicable.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Acrid Scents Of Autumn, Reminiscent Of Slinking Beasts, Make Me Fear

Why Doesn't The Past Decently Bury Itself, Instead Of Sitting Waiting To Be Admired By The Present?

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

If We Lose Our Sanity ... We Can But Howl The Lugubrious Howl Of Idiots, The Howl Of The Utterly Lost Howling Their Nowhereness.

What Sex Is, We Don't Know, But It Must Be Some Sort Of Fire. For It Always Communicates A Sense Of Warmth, Of Glow. And When This Glow Becomes A Pure Shine, Then We Feel The Sense Of Beauty. We All Have The Fire Of Sex Slumbering Or Burning Inside Us. If We Live To Be Ninety, It Is Still There. Or, If It Dies, We Become One Of Those Ghastly Living Corpses Which Are Unfortunately Becoming More Numerous In The World.

For How Can A Man Stand, Unless He Have Something Sure Under His Feet. Can A Man Tread The Unstable Water All His Life, And Call That Standing? Better Give In And Drown At Once.

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

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.

The Autumn Always Gets Me Badly, As It Breaks Into Colours. I Want To Go South, Where There Is No Autumn, Where The Cold Doesn't Crouch Over One Like A Snow-leopard Waiting To Pounce.

It's Better To Be Born Lucky Than Rich. If You're Rich, You May Lose Your Money, But If You're Born Lucky, You Will Always Have More Money.

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.

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.

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

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

The Old Ideals Are Dead As Nails--nothing There. It Seems To Me There Remains Only This Perfect Union With A Woman--sort Of Ultimate Marriage--and There Isn't Anything Else.

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

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?

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Man In His Relation To His Deity.

Away With All Ideals. Let Each Individual Act Spontaneously From The Forever Incalculable Prompting Of The Creative Wellhead Within Him. There Is No Universal Law.

Your Most Vital Necessity In This Life Is That You Shall Love Your Wife Completely And Implicitly And In An Entire Nakedness Of Body And Spirit.... This That I Tell You Is My Message As Far As I've Got Any.

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

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.

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

Man Is A Thought-adventurer.

But I Like The Feel Of Men On Things, While They're Alive. There's A Feel Of Men About Trucks, Because They've Been Handled With Men's Hands, All Of Them.

Plant Consciousness, Insect Consciousness, Fish Consciousness, All Are Related By One Permanent Element, Which We May Call The Religious Element Inherent In All Life, Even In A Flea: The Sense Of Wonder. That Is Our Sixth Sense, And It Is The Natural Religious Sense.

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

Ursula And Gudrun Brangwen Sat One Morning In The Window-bay Of Their Father's House In Beldover, Working And Talking.

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. My Soul Knows That I Am Part Of The Human Race, My Soul Is An Organic Part Of The Great Human Race, As My Spirit Is Part Of My Nation. In My Own Very Self, I Am Part Of My Family.

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.

They Say Geniuses Mostly Have Great Mothers. They Mostly Have Sad Fates.

No Man Is A Man Unless To His Woman He Is A Pioneer.

The Whole Life-effort Of Man Is To Get His Life Into Direct Contact With The Elemental Life Of The Cosmos, Mountain Life, Cloud Life, Thunder Life, Air Life, Earth Life, Sun Life. To Come Into Immediate Felt Contact, And So Derive Energy, Power And A Dark Sort Of Joy. This Effort Into Sheer Naked Contact, Without An Intermediary Or Mediator Is The Root Meaning Of Religion.

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.

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.

One Could Laugh At The World Better If It Didn't Mix Tender Kindliness With Its Brutality.

The Map Appears To Us More Real Than The Land.

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

The Only True Aristocracy Is That Of Consciousness.

America Exhausts The Springs Of One's Soul - I Suppose That's What It Exists For. It Lives To See All Real Spontaneity Expire. But Anyhow It Doesn't Grind On An Old Nerve As Europe Seems To.

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.

The English People On The Whole Are Surely The Nicest People In The World, And Everybody Makes Everything So Easy For Everyone Else, That There Is Almost Nothing To Resist At All.

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

So As Long As You Can Forget Your Body You Are Happy And The Moment You Begin To Be Aware Of Your Body, You Are Wretched. So If Civilization Is Any Good, It Has To Help Us Forget Our Bodies, And Then Time Passes Happily Without Our Knowing It. Help Us Get Rid Of Our Bodies Altogether.

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.

The Mind Is "ashamed" Of The Blood. And The Blood Is Destroyed By The Mind, Actually. Hence Palefaces.

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 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

Logic Might Be Unanswerable Because It Was So Absolutely Wrong.

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.

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.

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.

What You Intuitively Desire, That Is Possible To You.

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.

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.

The True Artist Doesn't Substitute Immorality For Morality. On The Contrary, He Always Substitutes A Finer Morality For A Grosser One.

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.

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

The Dead Don't Die. They Look On And Help.

Why, Oh Why Must One Grow Up, Why Must One Inherit This Heavy, Numbing Responsibility Of Living An Undiscovered Life? Out Of The Nothingness And The Undifferentiated Mass, To Make Something Of Herself! But What? In The Obscurity And Pathlessness To Take A Direction! But Whither? How Take Even One Step? And Yet, How Stand Still? This Was Torment Indeed, To Inherit The Responsibility Of One’s Own Life.

One Should Feel Inside Oneself For Right And Wrong, And Should Have The Patience To Gradually Realise One's God.

Perhaps Only People Who Are Capable Of Real Togetherness Have That Look Of Being Alone In The Universe. The Others Have A Certain Stickiness, They Stick To The Mass.

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

Curse The Blasted, Jelly-boned Swines, The Slimy, The Belly-wriggling Invertebrates, The Miserable Soddingrotters, The Flaming Sods, The Sniveling, Dribbling, Dithering, Palsied, Pulse-less Lot That Make Up England Today. They've Got White Of Egg In Their Veins, And Their Spunk Is That Watery It's A Marvel They Can Breed.

Eat And Carouse With Bacchus, Or Munch Dry Bread With Jesus, But Don't Sit Down Without One Of The Gods.

The Great Pagan World Of Which Egypt And Greece Were The Last Living Termsonce Had A Vast And Perhaps Perfect Science Of Itsown, A Science In Terms Of Life. In Our Era This Science Crumbled Into Magic And Charlatanry. But Even Wisdom Crumbles.

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.

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.

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.

Truth Does Not Lie Beyond Humanity, But Is One Of The Products Of The Human Mind And Feeling.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

It Always Seemed To Me That Men Wore Their Beards, Like They Wear Their Neckties, For Show.

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

We Are Dying, We Are Dying, Piecemeal Our Bodies Are Dying And Our Strength Leaves Us, And Our Soul Cowers Naked In The Dark Rain Over The Flood, Cowering In The Last Branches Of The Tree Of Our Life.

A Man Has No Religion Who Has Not Slowly And Painfully Gathered One Together, Adding To It, Shaping It; And One's Religion Is Never Complete And Final, It Seems, But Must Always Be Undergoing Modification.

The Near End Of The Street Was Rather Dark And Had Mostly Vegetable Shops. Abundance Of Vegetables - Piles Of White And Green Fennel, Like Celery, And Great Sheaves Of Young, Purplish, Sea-dust-coloured Artichokes . . . Long Strings Of Dried Figs, Mountains Of Big Oranges, Scarlet Large Peppers, A Large Slice Of Pumpkin, A Great Mass Of Colours And Vegetable Freshness. . . .

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

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.

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

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

There Is An Eternal Vital Correspondence Between Our Blood And The Sun: There Is An Eternal Vital Correspondence Between Our Nerves And The Moon. If We Get Out Of Contact And Harmony With The Sun And Moon, Then Both Turn Into Great Dragons Of Destruction Against Us.

The Love Between Man And Woman Is The Greatest And Most Complete Passion The World Will Ever See, Because It Is Dual, Because It Is Of Two Opposing Kinds.

And Whoever Forces Himself To Love Anybody Begets A Murderer In His Own Body.

Nothing But Love Has Made The Dog Lose His Wild Freedom, To Become The Servant Of Man.

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.

The Peasants Of Sicily, Who Have Kept Their Own Wheat And Make Their Own Natural Brown Bread, Ah, It Is Amazing How Fresh And Sweet And Clean Their Loaf Seems, So Perfumed, As Home-made Bread Used All To Be Before The War.

Whatever God There Is Is Slowly Eliminating The Guts And Alimentary System From The Human Being, To Evolve A Higher, More Spiritual Being.

For Us To Go To Italy And To Penetrate Into Italy Is Like A Most Fascinating Act Of Self-discovery

You Must Always Be A-waggle With Love.

We Are So Overwhelmed With Quantities Of Books, That We Hardly Realise Any More That A Book Can Be Valuable, Valuable Like A Jewel, Or A Lovely Picture, Into Which You Can Look Deeper And Deeper And Get A More Profound Experience Every Time.

I Do Esteem Individual Liberty Above Everything.

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

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.

Tragedy Is Like Strong Acid - It Dissolves Away All But The Very Gold Of Truth.

[hawthorne''s] Pious Blame Is A Chuckle Of Praise All The While.

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

They Wanted Genuine Intimacy, But They Could Not Get Even Normally Near To Anyone, Because They Scorned To Take The First Steps, They Scorned The Triviality Which Forms Common Human Intercourse.

Tragedy Looks To Me Like Man In Love With His Own Defeat. Which Is Only A Sloppy Way Of Being In Love With Yourself.

Loud Peace Propaganda Makes War Seem Imminent.

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

The True Unconscious Is The Well-head, The Fountain Of Real Motivity. The Sex Of Which Adam And Eve Became Conscious Derived Fromthe Very God Who Bade Them Be Not Conscious Of It.

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

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