Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.
And whoever forces himself to love anybody begets a murderer in his own body.
The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
The living moment is everything.
The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.
Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man.
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.