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.
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.
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.
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.