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To Our Senses, The Elements Are Four And Have Ever Been, And Will Ever Be For They Are The Elements Of Life, Of Poetry, And Of Perception, The Four Great Ones, The Four Roots, The First Four Of Fire And The Wet, Earth And The Wide Air Of The World. To Find The Other Many Elements, You Must Go To The Laboratory And Hunt Them Down. But The Four We Have Always With Us, They Are Our World. Or Rather, They Have Us With Them.

-D. H. Lawrence

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To Our Senses, The

D. H. Lawrence

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To Our Senses, The Elements Are Four And Have Ever Been, And Will Ever Be For They Are The Elements Of Life, Of Poetry, And Of Perception, The Four Great Ones, The Four Roots, The First Four Of Fire And The Wet, Earth And The Wide Air Of The World. To Find The Other Many Elements, You Must Go To The Laboratory And Hunt Them Down. But The Four We Have Always With Us, They Are Our World. Or Rather, They Have Us With Them.

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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.

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.

The Novel Is A Perfect Medium For Revealing To Us The Changing Rainbow Of Our Living Relationships. The Novel Can Help Us To Live,as Nothing Else Can: No Didactic Scripture, Anyhow. If The Novelist Keeps His Thumb Out Of The Pan.

[u]nless A Woman Is Held, By Man, Safe Within The Bounds Of Belief, She Becomes Inevitably A Destructive Force.

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

Only In A Novel Are All Things Given Full Play.

The Word Arse Is As Much God As The Word Face. It Must Be So, Otherwise You Cut Off Your God At The Waist.

For God's Sake, All Of You, Say Spiteful Things About Me, Then I Shall Know I Mean Something To You. Don't Say Surgaries, Or I'm Done.

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.

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

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.

And Besides, Look At Elder Flowers And Bluebells-they Are A Sign That Pure Creation Takes Place - Even The Butterfly. But Humanity Never Gets Beyond The Caterpillar Stage -it Rots In The Chrysalis, It Never Will Have Wings.it Is Anti-creation, Like Monkeys And Baboons.

The Final Aim Is Not To Know, But To Be.... You've Got To Know Yourself So That You Can At Last Be Yourself. "be Yourself" Is The Last Motto.

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.

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

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.

Europe's The Mayonnaise All Right, But America Supplies The Good Old Lobster.

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

Lies About Love We Are All Liars, Because The Truth Of Yesterday Becomes A Lie Tomorrow, Whereas Letters Are Fixed, And We Live By The Letter Of Truth. The Love I Feel For My Friend, This Year, Is Different From The Love I Felt Last Year. If It Were Not So, It Would Be A Lie. Yet We Reiterate Love! Love! Love! As If It Were A Coin With Fixed Value Instead Of A Flower That Dies, And Opens A Different Bud.

When I Read Shakespeare I Am Struck With Wonder That Such Trivial People Should Muse And Thunder In Such Lovely Language.

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

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

Let Yourself Fall In Love. If You Have Not Done So Already, You Are Wasting Your Life.

Falling In Love

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 Map Appears To Us More Real Than The Land.

Man Is A Thought-adventurer.

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.

Things Men Have Made With Wakened Hands, And Put Soft Life Into Are Awake Through Years With Transferred Touch, And Go On Glowing For Long Years. And For This Reason, Some Old Things Are Lovely Warm Still With The Life Of Forgotten Men Who Made Them.

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.

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.

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.

You Don't Want To Love - Your Eternal And Abnormal Craving Is To Be Loved. You Aren't Positive, You're Negative. You Absorb, Absorb, As If You Must Fill Yourself Up With Love, Because You've Got A Shortage Somewhere.

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.

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

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

The Feelings I Don't Have I Don't Have. The Feelings I Don't Have, I Won't Say I Have. The Felings You Say You Have, You Don't Have. The Feelings You Would Like Us Both To Have, We Neither Of Us Have.

We Only Seem To Learn From Life That Life Doesn't Matter So Much As It Seemed To Do - It's Not So Burningly Important, After All, What Happens. We Crawl, Like Blinking Sea-creatures, Out Of The Ocean Onto A Spur Of Rock, We Creep Over The Promontory Bewildered And Dazzled And Hurting Ourselves, Then We Drop In The Ocean On The Other Side: And The Little Transit Doesn't Matter So Much.

I Can Never Decide Whether My Dreams Are The Result Of My Thoughts, Or My Thoughts The Result Of My Dreams.

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

I Cannot Get Any Sense Of An Enemy - Only Of A Disaster.

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

I Am Only Half There When I Am Ill, And So There Is Only Half A Man To Suffer. To Suffer In One's Whole Self Is So Great A Violation, That It Is Not To Be Endured.

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.

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!

Marriage And Deathless Friendship, Both Should Be Inviolable And Sacred: Two Great Creative Passions, Separate, Apart, But Complementary: The One Pivotal, The Other Adventurous: The One, Marriage, The Centre Of Human Life; And The Other, The Leap Ahead.

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

It's Hard To Ravish A Tin Of Sardines.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Christian Fear Of The Pagan Outlook Has Damaged The Whole Consciousness Of Man.

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

There Is A Brief Time For Sex, And A Long Time When Sex Is Out Of Place. But When It Is Out Of Place As An Activity There Still Should Be The Large And Quiet Space In The Consciousness Where It Lives Quiescent. Old People Can Have A Lovely Quiescent Sort Of Sex, Like Apples, Leaving The Young Quite Free For Their Sort.

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.

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.

He Reflected On The Decay Of Mankind-the Decline Of The Human Race Into Folly And Weakness And Rottenness. 'be A Good Animal, True To Your Animal Instinct' Was His Motto.

To Our Senses, The Elements Are Four And Have Ever Been, And Will Ever Be For They Are The Elements Of Life, Of Poetry, And Of Perception, The Four Great Ones, The Four Roots, The First Four Of Fire And The Wet, Earth And The Wide Air Of The World. To Find The Other Many Elements, You Must Go To The Laboratory And Hunt Them Down. But The Four We Have Always With Us, They Are Our World. Or Rather, They Have Us With Them.

Money Is A Sort Of Instinct. It's A Sort Of Property Of Nature In A Person To Make Money. It's Nothing You Do. It's No Trick You Play. It's A Sort Of Permanent Accident Of Your Own Nature; Once You Start, You Make Money, And You Go On. . . But You've Got To Begin. . . You've Got To Get In. You Can Do Nothing If You Are Kept Outside. You've Got To Beat Your Way In. Once You've Done That, You Can't Help It!

The Real Tragedy Of England, As I See It, Is The Tragedy Of Ugliness. The Country Is So Lovely: The Man-made England Is So Vile.

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.

He Knew That Conscience Was Chiefly Fear Of Society Or Fear Of Oneself.

Melville Had To Fight, Fight Against The Existing World, Against His Own Very Self. Only He Would Never Quite Put The Knife In The Heart Of His Paradisal Ideal. Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen, Love Should Be A Fulfillment, And Life Should Be A Thing Of Bliss. That Was His Fixed Ideal. Fata Morgana. That Was The Pin He Tortured Himself On, Like A Pinned-down Butterfly.

Logic Might Be Unanswerable Because It Was So Absolutely Wrong.

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.

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.

I Think Societal Instinct Much Deeper Than Sex Instinct — And Societal Repression Much More Devastating.

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.

Men Fight For Liberty And Win It With Hard Knocks. Their Children, Brought Up Easy, Let It Slip Away Again, Poor Fools. And Their Grandchildren Are Once More Slaves.

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 Purest Lesson Our Era Has Taught Is That Man, At His Highest, Is An Individual, Single, Isolate, Alone, In Direct Soul-communication With The Unknown God, Which Prompts Within Him.

Love's A Dog In A Manger.

I Am Convinced That The Majority Of People To-day Have Good, Generous Feelings Which They Can Never Know, Never Experience, Because Of Some Fear, Some Repression. I Do Not Believe That People Would Be Villains, Thieves, Murderers And Sexual Criminals If They Were Freed From Legal Restraint.

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!

Anyone Who Is Kind To Man Knows The Fragmentariness Of Most Men, And Wants To Arrange A Society Of Power In Which Men Fall Naturally Into A Collective Wholeness, Since They Cannot Have An Individual Wholeness. In This Collective Wholeness They Will Be Fulfilled. But If They Make Efforts At Individual Fulfilment, They Must Fail For They Are By Nature Fragmentary.

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.

And This Is The Final Meaning Of Work: The Extension Of Human Consciousness. The Lesser Meaning Of Work Is The Achieving Of Self-preservation.

God Doesn't Know Things. He Is Things.

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

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

In My Very Own Self, I Am Part Of My Family.

The True Self Is Not Aware That It Is A Self. A Bird, As It Sings, Sings Itself. But Not According To A Picture. It Has No Idea Of Itself.

She Let Him Come Further, His Lips Came And Surging, Surging, Soft, Oh Soft, Yet On, Like The Powerful Surge Of Water, Irresistible, Till With A Little Blind Cry, She Broke Away.

In Masturbation There Is Nothing But Loss.

There's Lots Of Good Fish In The Sea...maybe...but The Vast Masses Seem To Be Mackerel Or Herring, And If You're Not Mackerel Or Herring Yourself, You Are Likely To Find Very Few Good Fish In The Sea.

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.

It Seems To Me A Purely Lyric Poet Gives Himself, Right Down To His Sex, To His Mood, Utterly And Abandonedly, Whirls Himself Roundtill He Spontaneously Combusts Into Verse. He Has Nothing That Goes On, No Passion, Only A Few Intense Moods, Separate Like Odd Stars, And When Each Has Burned Away, He Must Die.

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

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

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.

Reach Me A Gentian, Give Me A Torch! Let Me Guide Myself With The Blue, Forked Torch Of A Flower Down The Darker And Darker Stairs, Where Blue Is Darkened On Blueness Even Where Persephone Goes, Just Now, From The Frosted September To The Sightless Realm Where Darkness Is Awake Upon The Dark.

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

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

We Make A Mistake Forsaking England And Moving Out Into The Periphery Of Life. After All, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- As Far As We Go, They Are Only The Negation Of What We Ourselves Stand For And Are: And We're Rather Like Jonahs Running Away From The Place We Belong.

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.

How The Horse Dominated The Mind Of The Early Races Especially Of The Mediterranean! You Were A Lord If You Had A Horse. Far Back, Far Back In Our Dark Soul The Horse Prances...the Horse, The Horse! The Symbol Of Surging Potency And Power Of Movement, Of Action In Man!

The East Is Not For Me--the Sensuous Spiritual Voluptuousness, The Curious Sensitiveness Of The Naked People, Their Black, Bottomless, Hopeless Eyes.

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

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.

One Doesn't Know, Till One Is A Bit At Odds With The World, How Much One's Friends Who Believe In One Rather Generously, Mean To One.

Oh, For The Wonder That Bubbles Into My Soul.

... 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.

I Never Saw A Wild Thing Sorry For Itself. A Small Bird Will Drop Frozen Dead From A Bough Without Ever Having Felt Sorry For Itself.

Good God, What Does It Matter? If Life Is A Tragedy, Or A Farce, Or A Disaster, Or Anything Else, What Do I Care! Let Life Be What It Likes. Give Me A Drink, That's What I Want Just Now.

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.

That's How Women Are With Me " Said Paul. "they Want Me Like Mad But They Don't Want To Belong To Me.

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

Money Is Our Madness, Our Vast Collective Madness.

I Should Feel The Air Move Against Me, And Feel The Things I Touched, Instead Of Having Only To Look At Them. I'm Sure Life Is All Wrong Because It Has Become Much Too Visual - We Can Neither Hear Nor Feel Nor Understand, We Can Only See. I'm Sure That Is Entirely Wrong.

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!

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

God Is Only A Great Imaginative Experience.

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.

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

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 Glamour Of Childish Days Is Upon Me, My Manhood Is Cast Down In The Flood Of Remembrance.

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

An Artist Is Only An Ordinary Man With A Greater Potentiality.

The Fairest Thing In Nature, A Flower, Still Has Its Roots In Earth And Manure.

I Am Not A Mechanism, An Assembly Of Various Sections. And It Is Not Because The Mechanism Is Working Wrongly, That I Am Ill. I Am Ill Because Of Wounds To The Soul, To The Deep Emotional Self, And The Wounds To The Soul Take A Long, Long Time, Only Time Can Help And Patience, And A Certain Difficult Repentance Long Difficult Repentance, Realization Of Life’s Mistake, And The Freeing Oneself From The Endless Repetition Of The Mistake Which Mankind At Large Has Chosen To Sanctify.

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.

In The Short Summer Night She Learned So Much. She Would Have Thought A Woman Would Have Died Of Shame... She Felt, Now, She Had Come To The Real Bedrock Of Her Nature, And Was Essentially Shameless. She Was Her Sensual Self, Naked An Unashamed. She Felt A Triumph, Almost A Vainglory. So! That Was How It Was! That Was Life! That Was How Onself Really Was! There Was Nothing Left To Disguise Or Be Ashamed Of. She Shared Her Ultimate Nakedness With A Man, Another Being.

The Tragedy Is When You've Got Sex In The Head Instead Of Down Where It Belongs.

And Then She Realized That His Presence Was The Wall, His Presence Was Destroying Her. Unless She Could Break Out, She Must Die Most Fearfully, Walled Up In Horror. And He Was The Wall. She Must Break Down The Wall. She Must Break Him Down Before Her, The Awful Obstruction Of Him Who Obstructed Her Life To The Last. It Must Be Done, Or She Must Perish Most Horribly.

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

I Never Saw A Wild Thing Sorry For Itself

What We Want Is To Destroy Our False, Inorganic Connections, Especially Those Related To Money, And Re-establish The Living Organic Connections, With The Cosmos, The Sun And Earth, With Mankind And Nation And Family. Start With The Sun, And The Rest Will Slowly, Slowly Happen.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Hate's A Growing Thing Like Anything Else. It's The Inevitable Outcome Of Forcing Ideas Onto Life, Of Forcing One's Deepest Instincts; Our Deepest Feelings We Force According To Certain Ideas.

To Every Man Who Struggles With His Own Soul In Mystery, A Book That Is A Book Flowers Once, And Seeds, And Is Gone.

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

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

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.

The Italians Are Not Passionate: Passion Has Deep Reserves. They Are Easily Moved, And Often Affectionate, But They Rarely Have Any Abiding Passion Of Any Sort.

When Each Thing Is Unique In Itself, There Can Be No Comparison Made.... There Is Only This Strange Recognition Of Present Otherness.

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

Sunday Night Meant, In The Dark, Wintry, Rainy Midlands ... Anywhere Where Two Creatures Might Stand And Squeeze Together And Spoon.... Spooning Was A Fine Art, Whereas Kissing And Cuddling Are Calf-processes.

A Circle Swoop, And A Quick Parabola Under The Bridge Arches Where Light Pushes Through; A Sudden Turning Upon Itself Of A Thing In The Air. A Dip To The Water.

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.

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

The Trees Down The Boulevard Stand Naked In Thought, Their Abundant Summery Wordage Silenced, Caught In The Grim Undertow; Naked The Trees Confront Implacable Winter's Long, Cross-questioning Brunt.

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.

An Illusion Which Is A Real Experience Is Worth Having.

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.

A Book Lives As Long As It Is Unfathomed.

That Which One Cannot Experience In Daily Life Is Not True For Oneself.

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.

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)

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.

The Living Moment Is Everything.

The World Of Men Is Dreaming, It Has Gone Mad In Its Sleep, And A Snake Is Strangling It, But It Can't Wake Up.

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.

If A Novel Reveals True And Vivid Relationships, It Is A Moral Work, No Matter What The Relationships Consist In. If The Novelisthonours The Relationship In Itself, It Will Be A Great Novel.

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

The Only History Is A Mere Question Of One's Struggle Inside Oneself. But That Is The Joy Of It. One Need Neither Discover Americas Nor Conquer Nations, And Yet One Has As Great A Work As Columbus Or Alexander, To Do.

I Don't Believe Any More In Democracy. But I Can't Believe In The Old Sort Of Aristocracy, Either, Nor Can I Wish It Back, Splendid As It Was. What I Believe In Is The Old Homeric Aristocracy, When The Grandeur Was Inside A Man, And He Lived In A Simple Wooden House.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When All Comes To All, The Most Precious Element In Life Is Wonder. Love Is A Great Emotion, And Power Is Power. But Both Love And Power Are Based On Wonder.

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

Chains That Bind

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

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.

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.

Where Sanity Is There God Is.

Tragedy Ought Really To Be A Great Kick At Misery.

Sometimes Life Takes Hold Of One, Carries The Body Along, Accomplishes One's History, And Yet Is Not Real, But Leaves Oneself As It Were Slurred Over.

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.

The Nice Clean Intimacy Which We Now So Admire Between The Sexes Is Sterilizing. It Makes Neuters. Later On, No Deep, Magical Sex-life Is Possible.

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.

The Spirit Of Place [does Not] Exert Its Full Influence Upon A Newcomer Until The Old Inhabitant Is Dead Or Absorbed. So America.... The Moment The Last Nuclei Of Red [indian] Life Break Up In America, Then The White Men Will Have To Reckon With The Full Force Of The Demon Of The Continent.

A Woman Has To Live Her Life, Or Live To Repent Not Having Lived It.

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.

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.

The Pyramids Of Egypt Will Not Last A Moment Compared To The Daisy.

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.

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.

Satire Exists For The Purpose Of Killing The Social Being [for The Sake Of] The True Individual, The Real Human Being.

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.

The Tiny Fish Enjoy Themselves In The Sea.

I Like To Write When I Feel Spiteful; It's Like Having A Good Sneeze.

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.

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

Ours Is Essentially A Tragic Age, So We Refuse To Take It Tragically. The Cataclysm Has Happened, We Are Among The Ruins, We Start To Build Up New Little Habitats, To Have New Little Hopes. It Is Rather Hard Work: There Is Now No Smooth Road Into The Future: But We Go Round, Or Scramble Over The Obstacles. We’ve Got To Live, No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen.

Whether I Get On In The World Is A Question; But I Certainly Don't Get On Very Well With The World.

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

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.

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Friedrich Engels

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