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.
You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn’t quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn’t ever love at all.
I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.
In every living thing there is the desire for love.
It is only when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead ofthings kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins.
They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.
And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.