"The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action."

"My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily."

"Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion."

"The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one."

"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."

"It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance."

"The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept."

"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."

"Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little."

"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority."

"Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life."

"Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar."

"Money is our madness, our vast collective madness."

"The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write."

"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."

"It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral."

"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment."

"People always make war when they say they love peace."

"I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self."

"The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection."

"Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

"The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man."

"Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to."

"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."

"Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition."

"It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing."

"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul."

"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."

"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."

"The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack."

"I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves."

"The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just."

"The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens."

"The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else."

"Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks."

"Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering."

"Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration."

"Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man."

"Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror."

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."

"There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him."

"A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification."

"The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread."

"God is only a great imaginative experience."

"In every living thing there is the desire for love."

"Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."

"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."

"The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind."

"The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more."

"They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates."