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.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

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

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

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

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

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.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

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.

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

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

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