Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
[U]nless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force.
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.
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.
Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.
Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.
But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.
One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God.
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.
A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
Why does the thin grey strand Floating up from the forgotten Cigarette between my fingers, Why does it trouble me?
Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.
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 novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.
You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.
That she bear children is not a woman's significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.
To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.
Having achieved and accomplished love, then the man passes into the unknown. He has become himself, his tale is told.
I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me.
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.
Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still
Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.
Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking.
So slowly the hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire.
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.
When passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable.
Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh.
It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.