"The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?"
"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"
"The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread"
"The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death"
"The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens"
"The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write"
"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"
"The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure"
"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"
"Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man"
"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it"
"People always make war when they say they love peace"
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically"
"Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little"
"Only in a novel are all things given full play"
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them"
"One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes"
"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"
"Money is our madness, our vast collective madness"
"Men! The only animal in the world to fear"
"Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was"
"Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again"
"Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them"
"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"
"Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent"
"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep"
"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved"
"Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken"
"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze"
"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter"
"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 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 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"
"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"
"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams"