“This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us.”

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.

For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.

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.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

If only there weren’t so many other people in the world,’ he said lugubriously.

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

That’s the place to get to – nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.

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.

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

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.

The dead don’t die. They look on and help.

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.

It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things.

The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.

Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.

The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.

Every evil has its good, and every ill an antidote.

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention.

This is the curse of an evil deed, that it incites and must bring forth more evil.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

You’ve got to change your evil ways, baby, before I start loving you.

All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!