Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.
Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.
He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.
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.
Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.
No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.
The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
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!
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.
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.
Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.
It's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money, but if you're born lucky, you will always have more money.
Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.
Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion?.... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions.
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.
Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.
The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent.
And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.
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.
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.
She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men.
What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.
One man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.
O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey, still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life's exclusive city.
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.
How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed.
Yea, Paris is a festive ton -- a festive Ton for all! Skate o'er on joy -- Thin crust of gilded, polished joy! What matters it if Hell's beneath?
There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of -vast ranges of experience, like humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us.
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.
If you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a naturaland vital thing.
The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.
The east is not for me--the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes.
I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
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.
Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, don't swallow the culture bait, don't drink, don't drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.
[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, "We are one in the Father: we will go back." The Northern races said, "We are one in Christ, we will go on.
But I like the feel of men on things, while they're alive. There's a feel of men about trucks, because they've been handled with men's hands, all of them.
We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.
The love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.
The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.
You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister.
Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.
Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.