I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
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Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
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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.
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They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
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My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
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Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
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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!
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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.
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It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
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We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
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There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
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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.
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The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.
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All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
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So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
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Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
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Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
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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.
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The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
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It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
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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.
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Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
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Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
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The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
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The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
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Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
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Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
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The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and made their own bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loafs seem,so perfumes, as home-made bread used to be before the war.
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Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
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