Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower.
Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.
And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin?
How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.
Isn’t it god’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?
We are so conceited and so unproud.
Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.
The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.
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.
One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.
You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister.
There’s nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.
The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.
Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.
I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.
If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.
Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.
Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.