TuesdayAug 18, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
How beastly the bourgeois is Especially the male of the species.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.
The Marriage appears to us more real than the land.
Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it.
I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright and yet flowing: And the intellect is just the light that is shed on the things around.
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.
Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.
Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.
Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.
How the horse dominated the mind of the early races, especially of the Mediterranean! You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances.... The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.
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.
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.
Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
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 race, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family.
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.
You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.
A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.
For he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
I never saw a wild thing Sorry for itself.
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she is a dry stick as a rule.
It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.
The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes ... long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness....
The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.
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.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.... The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.
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