The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

I shall always be a priest of love.

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

I can’t do with mountains at close quarters – they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn’t dictate to her.

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

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one’s passional changes.

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

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.

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.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

Having achieved and accomplished love… man… has become himself, his tale is told.

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.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.