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.

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

The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.

The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy.

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.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

“When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

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.

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.

In his dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.

Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interested him more.

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

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.

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.

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

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

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct – and societal repression much more devastating.

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff’s edge, like Sappho into the sea.

Hate’s a growing thing like anything else. It’s the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one’s deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination.

Man is a thought-adventurer.

I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze.

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

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….

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea.

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

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.

To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.

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.

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth… .

For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action.

Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still.

There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

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

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.

The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.

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

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

I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin.

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.

You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.

There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.

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

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.

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.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.

A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.

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 living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night.

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night.

Perhaps you’re a slave to your own idea of yourself.

Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.

Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven.

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.

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.

She had borne so long this cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.

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

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’d be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

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.

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.

Where sanity is there God is.

Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.

I shall always be a priest of love.

One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.

The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.

The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.

The feelings I don’t have I don’t have. The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have. The felings you say you have, you don’t have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale.

I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.

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.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

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

When love turns into dust, money becomes the substitution.

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.

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods.

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.

You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.

Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of -vast ranges of experience, like humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches Where light pushes through; A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air. A dip to the water.

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.

I love Italian opera – it’s so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

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.

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 profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.

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.

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

A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.

How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.

Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world.

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

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.

When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.

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.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha.

The unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.

Only the flow matters; live and let live, love and let love. There is no point in love.

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

You feel free in Australia. There is great relief in the atmosphere – a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form. The Skies open above you and the areas open around you.

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.

The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

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

Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up

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

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.

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.

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

Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness. And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.

Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.

Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man.

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

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

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.

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.

You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.

While we live, let us live.

A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.

Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

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

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

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

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.

If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one’s mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.

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.

She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.

Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.

Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

Men are not free when they’re doing just what they like. Men are only free when they’re doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

That she bear children is not a woman’s significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate.

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

The great home of the soul is the open road.

The living moment is everything.

There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.