PostCultural Blues - Lawrence-citater
http://www.mobilixnet.dk/~mob75301/pcb/c006.htm

D.H. Lawrence

"This is what I believe: "That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest.
That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the
forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the
clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the
courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put
anything over me, but that I will try always to recognise and submit to
the gods in me and the gods in other men and women." -- D.H. Lawrence:
Studies in Classic American Literature, Benjamin Franklin

--

"Let us prepare now for the death of our present "little" life, and the
re-emergence in a bigger life, in touch with the moving cosmos. It is a
question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation,
vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is
through daily ritual, and the re-awakening. We must once more practice
the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire
and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last. This is
an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of day. The
ritual of the moon in her phases, of the morning star and the evening
star is for men and women separate. Then the ritual of the seasons, with
the Drama and the Passion of the soul embodied in procession and dance,
this is for the community, an act of men and women, a whole community,
in togetherness. And the ritual of the great events in the year of stars
is for nations and whole peoples. To these rituals we must return: or we
must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is, we are perishing
for lack of fulfilment of our greater needs, we are cut off from the
great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow
eternally in the universe. 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. It means a return to ancient forms. But
we shall have to create these forms again, and it is more difficult than
the preaching of an evangel. The Gospel came to tell us we were all
saved. We look at the world today and realise that humanity, alas,
instead of being saved from sin, whatever that may be, is almost
completely lost, lost to life, and near to nullity and extermination.
-- A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

"Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life. -- Unrhyming
Poems, Cypresses

"However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or
spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes
in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are
sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we
yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honour and glory
from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have
length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived.
-- Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, Blessed are
the Powerful

"Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but
his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is
all that matters. Away with eternal truth. -- Studies in Classic
American Literature, The Spirit of Place

"Take nothing, to say: I have it! For you can possess nothing, not even
peace. Nought is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life,
nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing:
It is mine. Say only: It is with me. -- The Plumed Serpent, Lords of
the Day and Night

"We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body
with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind
in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at
last throw the bottle away: the body, of course, being the bottle. It is
a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so
cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing
compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge
difference between my hand and my brain? - or my mind? My hand is alive,
it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe,
in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of
things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like
a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little
bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just
as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine
that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is
absolutely alive, me alive. -- Why the Novel Matters

"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. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to
my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or
what not. -- Brev til Ernest Collings, 17/1 1913

"Kill money, put money out of existence. It is a perverted instinct, a
hidden thought which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones,
the soul. -- Pansies, Kill Money

"Nowadays society is evil. It finds subtle ways of torture, to destroy
the life-quick, to get at the life-quick in a man. Every possible form.
And still a man can hold out, if he can laugh and listen to the Holy
Ghost. -- Studies in Classic American Literature, Edgar Allan Poe

"What is wrong then? The system. But when you've said that you've said
nothing. The system, after all, is only the outcome of the human psyche,
the human desires. We shout and blame the machine. But who on earth
makes the machine, if we don't? And any alterations in the system are
only modifications in the machine. - The system is in us, it is not
something external to us. The machine is in us, or it would never come
out of us. Well then, there's nothing to blame but ourselves, and
there's nothing to change except inside ourselves. -- Education of the
People, I

"The esoteric knowledge will always be esoteric, since knowledge is an
experience, not a formula. But it is foolish to hand out the formulae. A
little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. No age proves it more than
ours. Monkey-chatter is at last the most disastrous of all things. --
Sketches of Etruscan Places, The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1.

"Man must destroy as he goes, as trees fall for trees to rise. The
accumulation of life and things means rottenness. Life must destroy
life, in the unfolding of creation. We save up life at the expence of
the unfolding, till all is full of rottenness. Then at last, we make a
break. What's to be done? Generally speaking, nothing. The dead will
have to bury their dead, while the earth stinks of corpses. The
individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself. Try
to hold fast to the living thing, which destroys as it goes, but remains
sweet. And in his soul fight, fight, fight to preserve that which is
life in him from the ghastly kisses and poison-bites of the myriad evil
ones. Retreat to the desert, and fight. But in his soul adhere to that
which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the
stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. The one passionate
principle of creative being, which recognises the natural good, and has
a sword for the swarms of evil. Fights, fights, fights to protect
itself. But with itself, is strong and at peace. -- St Mawr

"We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and
forever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute.
There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things
flow and change, and even change is not absolute. -- Why the Novel
Matters

"Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious
belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living,
organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled,
perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild
west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are
freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a
rattling of chains, always was. -- Studies in Classic American
Literature, The Spirit of Place

"The human soul itself is the source and well-head of creative activity.
In the unconscious human soul the creative prompting issues first into
the universe. Open the consciousness to this prompting, away with all
your old sluice-gates, locks, dams, channels. No ideal on earth is
anything more than an obstruction, in the end, to the creative issue of
the spontaneous soul. Away with all ideals. Let each individual act
spontaneously from the for ever incalculable prompting of the creative
well-head within him. There is no universal law. Each being is, at his
purest, a law unto himself, single, unique, a Godhead, a fountain from
the unknown. -- Forord til Leo Shestovs All Things Are Possible

"Politics - what are they? Just another, extra-large commercial wrangle
over buying and selling - nothing else. -- Democracy, I The Average

"The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole
consciousness of man. ...The instinctive policy of Christianity towards
all true pagan evidence has been and is still: suppress it, destroy it,
deny it. This dishonesty has vitiated Christian thought from the start.
It has, even more curiously, vitiated ethnological scientific thought
the same. Curiously enough, we do not look on the Greeks and the Romans
after about 600 B.C., as real pagans: not like Hindus or Persians,
Babylonians or Egyptians or even Cretans, for example. We accept the
Greeks and Romans as the initiators of our intellectual and political
civilisation, the Jews as the fathers of our moral-religious
civilisation. So these are "our sort". All the rest are mere nothing,
almost idiots. All that can be attributed to the "barbarians" beyond the
Greek pale: that is, to Minoans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Chaldeans,
Persians and Hindus, is, in the famous phrase of a famous German
professor: Urdummheit. Urdummheit, or primal stupidity, is the state of
all mankind before precious Homer, and of all races, all, except Greek,
Jew, Roman and Ð ourselves! ... We look at the wonderful remains of
Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and old India, and we repeat to
ourselves: Urdummheit! Urdummheit? We look at the Etruscan tombs and ask
ourselves again, Urdummheit? primal stupidity? Why, in the oldest of
peoples, in the Egyptian friezes and the Assyrian, in the Etruscan
paintings and the Hindu carvings we see a splendour, a beauty, and very
often a joyous, sensitive intelligence which is certainly lost in our
world of Neufrechheit. If it is a question of primal stupidity or new
impudence, then give me primal stupidity. -- Apocalypse, VI

"Eh, one wishes things were different. But there's no help for it. One
can only do one's best, and then stay brave. Don't weaken or fret. While
we live, we must be game. And when we come to die, we'll die game too.
-- Brev til Gertrude Cooper, 23/1 1927

"All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style, and form, all this
pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an
imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence, and mostly dull
jargon. A critic must be able to feel the impact of a work of art in all
its complexity and its force. To do so, he must be a man of force and
complexity himself, which few critics are. A man with a paltry, impudent
nature will never write anything but paltry, impudent criticism. And a
man who is emotionally educated is as rare as a phoenix. The more
scholastically educated a man is, generally, the more he is an emotional
boor. -- John Galsworthy

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But it
is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them. -- Last Poems, The
Hands of God

"To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever
been interjected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection,
in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. An idea
which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there
like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery today.
Instead of living from the spontaneous centres, we live from the head.
We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in
our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary
affective centres, our centres of spontaneous being, are so utterly
ground round and automatised that they squeak in all stages of
disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people - and not we alone -
of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are
raving. -- Fantasia of the Unconscious, First Steps in Education

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The
pyramids will not last a moment, compared with the daisy. And before
Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of
Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale still will
sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor
urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a
chirrup. -- Sketches of Etruscan Places, Tarquinia

"Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us
all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of
circumstance, and doomed to misery. It is a kind of aeroplane view. It
became the popular outlook, and so today we actually are, millions of
us, little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance,
and doomed to misery; until we take a different view of ourselves. For
man always becomes what he passionately thinks he is; since he is
capable of becoming almost anything. -- Introduktion til Giovanni
Vergas Mastro-don Gesualdo

"I believe in the living extending consciousness of man. I believe the
consciousness of man has now to embrace the emotions and passions of
sex, and the deep effects of human physical contact. This is the
glimmering edge of our awareness and our field of understanding, in the
endless business of knowing ourselves. -- Brev til Morris Ernst, 10/11
1928

"The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of
attention, and "discovers" a new world within the known world. Man, and
the animals, and the flowers, all live within a strange and for ever
surging chaos. ... But man cannot live in chaos. ... Man must wrap
himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability,
fixity. In his terror of chaos he begins by putting up an umbrella
between himself and the everlasting whirl. Then he paints the under-side
of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives and dies
under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes
a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.
Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the
wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol.
Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the
umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun.
But after a while, getting used to the vision, and not liking the
genuine draught from chaos, commonplace man daubs a simulacrum of the
window that opens on to chaos, and patches the umbrella with the painted
patch of the simulacrum. That is, he has got used to the vision; it is
part of his house-decoration. So that the umbrella at last looks like a
glowing open firmament, of many aspects. But alas! it is all simulacrum,
in innumerable patches. -- Chaos in Poetry

"Now above all is the time for the minorities of men, those who are
neither bourgeois nor bolshevist, but true to life, to gather and
fortify themselves, in every class, in every country, in every race.

Instead of which, the minorities that still see the gleam of life submit
abjectly to the blind mechanical traffic-streams of those horrors the
stone-blind bourgeois, and the stone-blind bolshevist, and pander to
them. -- More Pansies, Minorities in Danger

"Man creates a god in his own image, and the god grows old along with
the men that made him. But storms sway in heaven, and the god-stuff
sweeps high and angry over our heads. Gods die with men who have
conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with
too vast a sound to be heard. Like the sea in storm, that beats against
the rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them. Or like the
sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes the feet
and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of trees. - Ye must
be born again. Even the gods must be born again. We must be born again.
-- The Plumed Serpent, Fortieth Birthday

"Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilisation, which is
civilisation based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom.
All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total
of boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored. Do as they may,
they are bored. They are bored because they experience nothing. And they
experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the
wonder has gone out of a man he is dead. He is henceforth only an
insect. -- Assorted Articles, Hymns in a Man's Life

"Law is a very, very clumsy and mechanical instrument, and we people are
very, very delicate and subtle beings. -- Study of Thomas Hardy,
Chapter II

"Thought, I love thought. But not the jiggling and twisting of already
existent ideas I despise that self-important game. Thought is the
welling up of unknown life into consciousness, Thought is the testing of
statements on the touchstone of the conscience, Thought is gazing on to
the face of life, and reading what can be read, Thought is pondering
over experience, and coming to a conclusion. Thought is not a trick, or
an exercise, or a set of dodges, Thought is a man in his wholeness
wholly attending. -- More Pansies, Thought

"Culture and civilisation are tested by vital consciousness. Are we more
vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably
we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of
paper. We have no depth to our consciousness. -- Apocalypse, VII

"The Father forgives: the Son forgives: but the Holy Ghost does not
forgive. So take that. The Holy Ghost doesn't forgive because the Holy
Ghost is within you. The Holy Ghost is you: your very You. So if, in
your conceit of your ego, you make a break in your own YOU, in your own
integrity, how can you be forgiven? You might as well make a rip in your
own bowels. You know if you rip your own bowels they will go rotten and
you will go rotten. And there's an end of you, in the body. The same if
you make a breach with your own Holy Ghost. You go soul-rotten. --
Studies in Classic American Literature, Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance"

"The most evil things in the world, today, are to be found under the
chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the garment of our
vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness covers a bog. --
The Crown, IV Within the Sepulchre (i: Reflections on the Death of a
Porcupine and Other Essays)

"Shall I expect the lion to lie down with the lamb? Shall I expect such
a thing? I might as well hope for the earth to cast no shadow, or for
burning fire to give no heat. It is no good, these are mere words. When
the lion lies down with the lamb he is no lion, and the lamb, lying down
with him, is no lamb. They are merely a neutralisation, a nothingness.
If I mix fire and water, I get quenched ash. And so if I mix the lion
and the lamb. They are both quenched into nothingness. -- The Reality
of Peace, IV The Orbit

"But where is the point to life? Where is the point to love? Where, if
it comes to the point, is the point to a bunch of violets? There is no
point. 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. -- Assorted Articles, Do Women
Change?

"When we postulate a beginning, we only do so to fix a starting-point
for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an
end of the universe. The creative mystery, which is life itself, always
was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures. --
The Two Principles

"Man is a thought-adventurer. Man is a great venture in consciousness.
Where the venture started, and where it will end, nobody knows. --
Books

"We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more, neither does
the moon. In mystic language, the moon is black to us, and the sun is a
sackcloth. Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can't be done by a
trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to
come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who
knows how long it will take to bring them to life. -- Apocalypse, V

"The mass is for ever vulgar, because it can't distinguish between its
own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by
the exploiter. The public is always profane, because it is controlled
from the outside, by the trickster, and never from the inside, by its
own sincerity. The mob is always obscene, because it is always
second-hand. -- Pornography and Obscenity

"The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But
the tablets of stones he engraved them on are millstones round our
necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine
than flowers are. -- Kangaroo, Kangaroo

"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. -- Brev til Sallie Hopkin, 2/6 1912
(Lawrence forelsket i Frieda Weekley, kvinden i hans liv)

"If we want to be free, we cannot be free to do otherwise than follow
our own soul, our own true nature, to its fulfilment. -- Education of
the People, II

"Men live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually
withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or
metaphysics - exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and
art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin,
and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future; neither
for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone grey and opaque.
We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the
heart really believes in after all: and what the heart really wants, for
the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief and of
knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfilment in life and
art. -- Fantasia of the Unconscious, Foreword

"To tell the truth, I am sick to death of the Jewish monotheistic
string. It has become monomaniac. I prefer the pagan many gods, and the
animistic vision. ... One just knows that all our Pale-face and Hebraic
monotheistic insistence is a dead letter - the soul won't answer any
more. ... I know there has to be a return to the older vision of life.
But not for the sake of unison. And not done from the will. It needs
some welling up of religious sources that have been shut down in us: a
great yielding, rather than an act of will: a yielding to the darker,
older unknown, and a reconciliation. Nothing bossy. Yet the natural
mystery of power. -- Brev til Rolf Gardiner, 4/7 1924

"Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and
there is a natural balance between the two, and each has a natural
respect for the other. -- A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

"In democracy, bullying inevitably takes the place of power. Bullying is
the negative form of power. The modern Christian State is a
soul-destroying force, for it is made up of fragments which have no
organic whole, only a collective whole. In a hierarchy, each part is
organic and vital, as my finger is an organic and vital part of me. But
a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of
myriad dis-united fragments, each fragment assuming itself a false
wholeness, a false individuality. -- Apocalypse, XXIII

"Every goal is a grave, when you get there. -- Reflections on the Death
of a Porcupine and Other Essays, Him With His Tail in His Mouth

"A real individual has a spark of danger in him, a menace to society.
Quench this spark and you quench the individuality, you obtain a social
unit, not an integral man. All modern progress has tended, and still
tends, to the production of quenched social units: dangerless beings,
ideal creatures! -- Education of the People, V

"Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our
different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape
and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal
life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more
than an extension of our personality, to us. To the pagan, landscape and
personal background were on the whole indifferent. But the cosmos was a
very real thing. A man lived with cosmos, and knew it greater than
himself. Don't let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations
saw it. All we see is a scientific little luminary, dwindled to a ball
of blazing gas. ... We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost
Helios forever, and the great orb of the Chaldeans still more. We have
lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and
this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of nature Ð
Nature!! Ð compared to the ancient magnificent living with cosmos, and
being honoured by the cosmos! -- Apocalypse, V

"I feel quite anti-social, against this social whole as it exists. I
wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But my way of
shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these
social people of today, perhaps is more satisfying. But I feel like an
outlaw. All my work is a shot at their vey innermost strength, these
banded people of today. Let them cease to be. Let them make way for
another, fewer, stronger, less cowardly people. -- Brev til Lady
Ottoline Morrell, 15/2 1916

"To most of us today [the word God] is a fetish-word, dead, yet useful
for invocation. It is not a question of Jesus. It is a question of God,
Almighty God. We have to square ourselves with the very words. And to do
so, we must rid them of their maddening moral import, and give them back
- Almighty God - the old vital meaning: strength and glory and honour
and might and beauty and wisdom. These are the continual attributes of
Almighty God, in the far past. And the same today, the god who enters us
and imbues us with his strength and glory and might and honour and
beauty and wisdom, this is a god we are eager to worship. -- Anmeldelse
af Eric Gills Art Nonsense and Other Essays

"A thing that you sincerely believe in cannot be wrong, because belief
does not come at will. It comes only from the Holy Ghost within.
Therefore a thing you truly believe in, cannot be wrong. -- Studies in
Classic American Literature, Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance"

"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. -- Pansies, Let us be Men

"Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and
mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions.
Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the
degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man
only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all
that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we
shall be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our
integrity and our proud being. The creative, spontaneous soul sends
forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings
are our true fate, which it is our business to fulfil. A fate dictated
from outside, from theory or from circumstances, is a false fate. ...
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
-- Foreword to Women in Love

"Only when we fall into egoism do we lose all chance of blossoming, and
then the flux of corruption is the breath of our existence. -- The
Crown, IV Within the Sepulchre (i: Reflections on the Death of a
Porcupine and Other Essays)

"Civilisations rise in waves, and pass away in waves. And not till
science, or art, tries to catch the ultimate meaning of the symbols that
float on the last waves of the prehistoric period; that is, the period
before our own; shall we be able to get ourselves into right relation
with man as man is and has been and will always be. In the days before
Homer, men in Europe were not mere brutes and savages and prognathous
monsters: neither were they simple-minded children. Men are always men,
and though intelligence takes different forms, men are always
intelligent: they are not empty brutes, or dumb-bells en masse. --
Sketches of Etruscan Places, The Florence Museum

"To carry on a tradition, you must add something to the tradition. But
to keep up a convention needs only the monotonous persistence of a
parasite, the endless endurance of the craven, those who fear life
because they are not alive, and who cannot die because they cannot live.
The social beings. -- John Galsworthy

"Resolution: Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to
sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be
killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the
men in whom you recognise the Holy Ghost. -- Studies in Classic
American Literature, Benjamin Franklin

"Oh what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhytm of
the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh what a
catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely
personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun,
and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!
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, and love is 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 civilised
vase on the table. -- A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

"The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that
arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new
gestures, new embraces, new motions, new combinations, new creations.
-- Kangaroo, Kangaroo

"It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street is a
robot, and incapable of love he is capable of an endless, grinding,
nihilistic hate: that is the only strong feeling he is capable of; and
therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the
street, they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably. --
More Pansies, Robot Feelings

"God is gone, until next time. But the next time will come. And then
again we shall see God, and once more, it will be different. It is
always different. -- The Crown, VI To Be, and to Be Different (i:
Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays)

"Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin
to recognise the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall
be lords on the earth. -- Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and
Other Essays, Aristocracy

"Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is
always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master
they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master
they wish to undermine. -- Studies in Classic American Literature, The
Spirit of Place

"The young to-day are born prisoners, poor things, and they know it.
Born in a universal workhouse, and they feel it. Inheriting a sort of
confinement, work, and prisoners' routine and prisoners' flat,
ineffectual pastime. -- Pansies, Poor Young Things

"One must go where the unfaltering spirit goes, there must be no balking
the issue, because of fear. -- Women in Love, Sunday Evening

"This feeling only what you allow yourselves to feel at last kills all
capacity for feeling, and in the higher emotional range, you feel
nothing at all. This has come to pass in our present century. The higher
emotions are strictly dead. They have to be faked. And by higher
emotions we mean love in all its manifestations, from genuine desire to
tender love, love of one's fellow-men, and love of God: we mean love,
joy, delight, hope, true indignant anger, passionate sense of justice
and injustice, truth and untruth, honour and dishonour, and real belief
in anything: for belief is a profound emotion that has the mind's
connivance. All these things, today, are more or less dead. We have in
their place the loud and sentimental counterfeit of all such emotion.
-- A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

"Our present system of education is extravagantly expensive, and simply
dangerous to our social existence. It turns out a lot of half-informed
youth who despise the whole business of understanding and wisdom, and
who realise that in a world like ours nothing but money matters. --
Education of the People, II

"You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character.
There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is
unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which
it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to
discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element. --
Brev til Edward Garnett, 5/6 1914

"The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces the
more we numb and atrophy our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to
have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny
ourselves and annul our being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire,
water, are there like some great mistress whom we woo and struggle with,
whom we heave and wrestle with. And all our appliances do but deny us
these fine embraces, take the miracle of life away from us. The machine
is the great neuter. It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it
emasculates us all. When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we
partake of the mysteries. But when we turn on an electric tap there is,
as it were, a wad between us and the dynamic universe. We do not know
what we lose by all our labour-saving appliances. Of the two evils it
would be much the lesser to lose all machinery, every bit, rather than
to have, as we have, hopelessly too much. -- Studies in Classic
American Literature, Dana's "Two Years Before The Mast"

"The course of the barren spirit is dogmatically to assert One God, one
Way, one Glory, one exclusive salvation. And this One God is indeed God,
this one Way is the way, but it is the way of egoism, and the One God is
the reflection, inevitably, of the worshipper's ego. -- The Crown, II
(i: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays)

"Our epoch is over, a cycle of evolution is finished, our activity has
lost its meaning, we are ghosts, we are seed; for our word is dead and
we know not how to live wordless. -- Pansies, Dies Irae

"Moderation: Beware of absolutes. There are many gods. -- Studies in
Classic American Literature, Benjamin Franklin

"I am convinced that the majority of people today have good, generous
feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some
fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains,
thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal
restraint. On the contrary, I think the vast majority would be much more
generous, good-hearted and decent if they felt they dared be. I am
convinced that people want to be more decent, more good-hearted than our
social system of money and grab allows them to be. The awful fight for
money, into which we are all forced, hurts our good nature more than we
can bear. I am sure this is true of a vast number of people. --
Assorted Articles, The State of Funk

"If anatomy pre-supposes a corpse, then psychology pre-supposes a world
of corpses. Personalities, which mean personal criticism and analysis,
presupposes a whole world-laboratory of human psyches waiting to be
vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence,
nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology. --
St Mawr

"Everything human degenerates, from religion downwards, and must be
renewed and revived. -- Apocalypse, XIX

"Poor, paltry, creeping little world we live in, even the keys of death
and Hades are lost. How shut in we are! All we can do, with our
brotherly love, is to shut one another in. We are so afraid somebody
else might be lordly and splendid, when we can't. Petty little
bolshevists, every one of us today, we are determined that no man shall
shine like the sun in full strength, for he would certainly outshine
us. -- Apocalypse, V

"What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.
-- Pornography and Obscenity

"Unless we submit our will to the flooding of life, there is no life in
us. -- The Reality of Peace, I The Transference

"The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the
most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. For a long time,
even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call
of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong
is the aristocratic instinct in man. But the willingness to give the
response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and
weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then
men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only
listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power
of mediocrity. which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior
and even base politicians. Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The
democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men. And
then the sacred "will of the people" becomes blinder, baser, colder and
more dangerous than the will of any tyrant. When the will of the people
becomes the sum of the weakness of a multitude of weak men, it is time
to make a break. So today. Society consists of a mass of weak
individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every
possible imaginary evil, and of course, by their very fear, bringing the
evil into being. -- Apocalypse, IV

"Say what you like, every idea is perishable: even the idea of God or
Love or Humanity or Liberty - even the greatest idea has its day and
perishes. -- Kangaroo, "Revenge!" Timotheus Cries

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up
new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work:
there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or
scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies
have fallen. -- Lady Chatterley's Lover, Chapter I

"Ideals! Ideals! All this paper between us. What a weariness. If only
people would meet in their very selves, without wanting to put some idea
over one another, or some ideal. Damn all ideas and all ideals. Damn all
the false stress, and the pins. I am I. Here am I. Where are you? Ah,
there you are! Now, damn the consequences, we have met. That's my idea
of democracy, if you can call it an idea. -- Studies in Classic
American Literature, Fenimore Cooper's White Novels

"This is a piece of very old wisdom, and it will always be true. Time
still moves in cycles, not in a straight line. And we are at the end of
the Christian cycle. And the Logos, the good dragon of the beginning of
the cycle is now the evil dragon of today. It will give its potency to
no new thing, only to old and deadly things. It is the red dragon, and
it must once more be slain by the heroes, since we can expect no more
from the angels. -- Apocalypse, XVI

"The bourgeois produces the bolshevist, inevitably as every half-truth
at length produces the contradiction of itself in the opposite
half-truth. -- More Pansies, Bourgeois and Bolshevist

"Once you abstract from this, once you generalise and postulate
Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the
realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism. -- Democracy, III
Personality

"We know that we are living in a state of falsity, that all our social
and religious form is dead, a crystallised lie. -- The Crown, VI To Be,
and to Be Different (i: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and
Other Essays)

"Accept it, recognise the natural power in the man, as men did in the
past, and give it homage, then there is a great joy, an uplifting, and a
potency passes from the powerful to he less powerful. There is a stream
of power. And in this, men have their best collective being, now and
forever. Recognise the flame of power, or glory, and a corresponding
flame springs up in yourself. Give homage and allegiance to a hero, and
you become yourself heroic. It is the law of men. Perhaps the law of
women is different. -- Apocalypse, III

"Temperance: Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with
Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods. -- Studies in
Classic American Literature, Benjamin Franklin

"When ever the feeling of terror came over him, the feeling of being
marked-out, branded, a criminal marked out by society, marked-out for
annihilation, he pulled himself together, saying to himself: "I am
letting them make me feel in the wrong. I am degrading myself by feeling
guilty, marked-out, and I have convulsions of fear. - But I am not
wrong. I have done no wrong, whatever I have done. That is, no wrong
that society has to do with. Whatever wrongs I have done are my own, and
private between myself and the other person. - One may be wrong, yes,
one is often wrong. But not for them to judge. For my own soul only to
judge. - Let me know them for human filth, all these pullers-down, and
let me watch them, as I would watch a reeking hyaena, but never fear
them. Let me watch them, to keep them at bay. But let me never admit for
one single moment that they may be my judges. That, never. I have judged
them: they are canaille. I am a man, and I abide by my own soul. Never
shall they have a chance of judging me." -- Kangaroo, The Nightmare

"The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings,
sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
-- Anmeldelse af Trigant Burrows The Social Basis of Consciousness

"If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious
form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting
slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that
we are all alike and indistinguishable. -- Study of Thomas Hardy,
Chapter IX

"I am in love - and, my God, it's 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 haven't done so already. You are wasting
your life. -- Brev til Arthur McLeod, 15/6 1912

"The cosmos became anathema to the Christians, though the early Catholic
Church restored it somewhat after the crash of the Dark Ages. Then again
the cosmos became anathema to the Protestants after the Reformation.
They substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order,
everything else became abstraction, and the long slow death of the human
being set in. This slow death produced science and machinery, but both
are death products. -- Apocalypse, VI

"We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that
which can be touched but not known. -- Nettles, Non-Existence

"In an age that, like ours, has lost the mystery of power, and the
reverence for power, a false power is substituted: the power of money.
This is a power based on the force of human envy end greed, nothing
more. So nations naturally become more envious and greedy every day.
While individuals ooze away in a cowardice that they call love. They
call it love, and peace, and charity, and benevolence, when it is mere
cowardice. Collectively they are hideously greedy and envious. True
power, as distinct from the spurious power, which is merely the force of
certain human vices directed and intensified by the human will: true
power never belongs to us. It is given us, from the beyond. --
Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, Blessed are
the Powerful

"Pfui! The very words human, humanity, humanism make one sick. For the
sake of humanity as such, I wouldn't lift a finger, much less write a
story. -- Climbing Down Pisgah

"I knew then, and I know now, it is no use trying to do anything - I
speak only for myself - publicly. It is no use trying merely to modify
present forms. The whole great form of our era will have to go. And
nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up
and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing, but fight
tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out,
and let them grow. We can't make life. We can but fight for the life
that grows in us. So that, personally, little magazines mean nothing to
me: nor groups, nor parties of people. I have no hankering after quick
response, nor the effusive, semi-intimate back-chat of literary
communion. What comes will come slowly, with some steadfastness. --
Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, Note to The
Crown

"There is no such thing as sin. There is only life and anti-life. --
Last Poems, The Old Idea of Sacrifice

"They accuse me of barbarism: I want to drag England down to the level
of savages. But it is this crude stupidity, deadness, about sex which I
find barbaric and savage. ... That ghastly crudity of seeing in sex
nothing but a functional act and a certain fumbling with clothes is, in
my opinion, a low degree of barbarism, savagery. And as far as sex goes,
our white civilisation is crude, barbaric, and uglily savage. -- A
Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

"Every Religion, every philosophy, and science itself, each has a clue
to the cosmos, to the becoming aware of the cosmos. Each clue leads to
its own goal of consciousness, then is exhausted. So religions exhaust
themselves, so science exhausts itself, once the human consciousness
reaches its own limit. The infinite of the human consciousness lies in
an infinite number of different starts to an infinite number of
different goals; which somehow, we know when we get there, is one goal.
But the new start is from a point in the hitherto unknown. -- Sketches
of Etruscan Places, The Florence Museum

"If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the
woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and
my game of joy is my work. -- Anmeldelse af Georgian Poetry: 1911-1912

"Life is so wonderful and complex, and always relative. A man's soul is
a perpetual call and answer. He can never be the call and the answer in
one. This is truth, for ever: the relation between the call and the
answer: between the dark God and the incarnate man: between the dark
soul of woman, and the opposite dark soul of man: and finally, between
the souls of man and man, strangers to one another, but answerers. So it
is forever, the eternal weaving of calls and answers, and the fabric of
life woven and perishing again. But the calls never cease, and the
answers never fail for long. And when the fabric becomes grey and
machine-made, some strange clarion-call makes men start to smash it up.
So it is. -- Kangaroo, "Revenge!" Timotheus Cries

"Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or
an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands,
or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the
part. And therefore I, who am man alive, am greater than my soul, or
spirit, or body, or mind, or consciousness, or anything else that is
merely a part of me. I am a man, and alive. I am man alive, and as long
as I can, I intend to go on being man alive. -- Why the Novel Matters

"The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the
contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as
soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively
immoral. -- Art and Morality

"No man is or can be purely individual. The mass of men have only the
tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move,
think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual
emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the
collective or social consciousness. It has always been so, and will
always be so. -- Apocalypse, XXIII

"What we want is some sort of communism not based on wages, nor profits,
nor any sort of buying and selling but on a religion of life. --
Pansies, The Root of our Evil

"For a thousand years man has been pushing his civilisation, like a
great snowball, uphill. All the time he has pushed it uphill, while it
got huger and huger. In the belief that he would come at last to the
happy top. Now he no longer believes there is any top. And as a matter
of fact, there isn't. So he has fallen into a funk, the go has gone out
of him. And the snowball of his own accumulation begins slowly to roll
back on him, slowly at first, but with gathering momentum, forcing him
downhill. This is what is happening today. -- Assorted Articles, On
Being a Man

"How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species. --
Pansies, How Beastly the Bourgeois is

"Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes! -- Reflections
on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, The Novel

"The very first thing of all to be recognised is the danger of idealism.
It is the one besetting sin of the human race. It means the fall into
automatism, mechanism, and nullity. ... Every man must live as far as he
can by his own soul's conscience. But not according to any ideal. To
submit the consciousness to a creed, or an idea, or a tradition, or even
an impulse, is our ruin. -- Fantasia of the Unconscious, The Vicious
Circle

"The white man's mind and soul are divided between these two things:
innocence and lust, the Spirit and Sensuality. Sensuality always carries
a stigma, and is therefore more deeply desired, or lusted after. But
spirituality alone gives the sense of uplift, exaltation, and "winged
life", with the inevitable reaction into sin and spite. So the white man
is divided against himself. He plays off one side of himself against the
other side, till it is really a tale told by an idiot, and nauseating.
-- Studies in Classic American Literature, Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking Novels

"We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of
all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are
complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead. -- Sketches of
Etruscan Places, The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 2.

"I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me.
But a work of art is an act of faith, as Michael Angelo says, and one
goes on writing, to the unseen witnesses. -- Brev til Barbara Low, 1/5
1916

"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic
is to save the tale from the artist who created it. -- Studies in
Classic American Literature, The Spirit of Place

"What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living
unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul". Man wants his
physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only,
he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be
most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may
know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the
flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here
and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for
a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive in the
flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as
my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know
perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part
of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul,
as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my
family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my
mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is
only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. So that my
individualism is really an illusion. I am part of the great whole, and I
can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become
a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false,
inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and
re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun
and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and
the rest will slowly, slowly happen. -- Apocalypse, XXIII

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