Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.
Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.
The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.
Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.
I like the one about the little soulworms that fly out of the nest for the resurrection.
I soon found out you can’t change the world. The best you can do is to learn to live with it.
Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life.
Perhaps I have not lined his portrait too clearly. But if he exists, if only for the reason that I have imagined him to be. He came from the blue and returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten.
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.
The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.
The poem is the dream made flesh, in a two-fold sense: as work of art, and as life, which is a work of art.
For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn.
The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.
The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary.
Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that’s all.
I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate, and personal.
I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that’s un-American somehow.
Art is only a means to life, the life more abundant. It merely points the way.
Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.