When I went to the scientific doctor I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me and reduce me to the level of a thing. So I said: Good-morning! and left him.
Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.
I’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God.
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.
I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me – and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.
Man is a thought-adventurer.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.
The great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living termsonce had a vast and perhaps perfect science of itsown, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.
I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these personaltimes.
The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose.
Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don’t get on very well with the world.
Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality – same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.
Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.
To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.
O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey, still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life’s exclusive city.
The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.