"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"
"The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity"
"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality"
"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!"
"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 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"
"Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got"
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it"
"I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps"
"It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral"
"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 one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself"
"The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere"
"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority"
"Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth"
"Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life"
"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten"
"They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates"
