The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

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

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.

So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

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.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

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.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

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.

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.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

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

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.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

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.

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

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.

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.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.