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.
Only the flow matters; live and let live, love and let love. There is no point in love.
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
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.
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?
Unless one decorates one’s house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.
The great home of the soul is the open road.
When science starts to be interpretive it is more unscientific even than mysticism.
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.
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.
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
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 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.
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!
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.
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.
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.
All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.
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.