They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
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.
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.
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.
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.
You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.
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.
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.
That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.
I believe the nearest I’ve come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.
The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.
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.
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.
The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.
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.
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.