Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.
So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
She was the flint and he the steel. But in continual striking together they only destroyed each other.
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law.
Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.
We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.
When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.
The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
What’s that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!
It’s bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.