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.

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

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

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

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

People always make war when they say they love peace.

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

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

God doesn’t know things. He is things.

The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

I am in love – and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

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.

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.

It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

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 great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.