Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.
Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
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.
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.
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.
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
If it doesn’t absorb you, if it isn’t any fun, don’t do it.
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.
Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven.
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.
I love Italian opera – it’s so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.
Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.
Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
I can’t do with mountains at close quarters – they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.