playwright, translator, writer, poet, novelist, painter, screenwriter, literary critic
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1885 – 1930
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 world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
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.
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.
My God, these folks don't know how to love — that's why they love so easily.
Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free from their authority.
He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.
It's the man who dares to take, who is independent, not he who gives.
When along the pavement,
Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband: he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms.
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.
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.
The dead don't die. They look on and help.
California is a queer place — in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
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.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it
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.
It was in 1915 the old world ended.
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers of cold are corpse fingers.
People always make war when they say they love peace.
The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
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.
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
I can't stand Willy wet-leg, he lets you hit him twice.
California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
I never saw a wild thing without ever having felt sorry for itself.
I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea.
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.
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
Those that go searching for love and they never have to seek for it.
The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.
I suppose that's what we do in death⎯⎯⎯sleep in wonder.
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.
To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort⎯⎯⎯to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep⎯⎯⎯that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life⎯⎯⎯our immortality.
My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
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.
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea ... maybe ... but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
Folks should do their own fuckin', then they wouldn't want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man's.
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.
I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all the cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.
They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.
The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.
Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.
Of course Celia shits! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars. Is not a man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at sunset? And a woman too? And does not the changing harmony and discord of their variation make the secret music of life?
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
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.
One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
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.
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
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.
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
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.
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.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
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.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
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.
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
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.
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
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.
The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
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.
There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.
You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
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.
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
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.
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.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
I shall always be a priest of love.
The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
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.
I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
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!
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
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.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
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.
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
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.
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
God doesn't know things. He is things.
The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
The profoundest of all sensualities
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.
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
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.
There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.
You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
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.
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
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.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
I shall always be a priest of love.
The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
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.
I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
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!
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
In every living thing there is the desire for love.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
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.
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
God doesn't know things. He is things.
The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
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.
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
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.
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.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
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.