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

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.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

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.

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.

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

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.

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.

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

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

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

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

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.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

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.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

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.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

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.

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

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

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

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

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!

I shall always be a priest of love.

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.

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 human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

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

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

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

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.

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

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

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.

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

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

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.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.