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.
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.
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.
We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ’em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.
The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.
Don’t talk to me any more about poetry for months – unless it is other men’s work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I’m fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.
One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.
The day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more.
I’ll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.
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.
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.
Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes.
It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
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.
I’d be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.