R.J. Lawrence Quotes

That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.

The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.

While we live, let us live.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?

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

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.

The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.

A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.

We are so conceited and so unproud.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species

Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.

I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.

As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends--give me the country.

Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.

The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose.

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.

In my very own self, I am part of my family.

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

I've never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself.

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

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.

The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate

Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure.

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

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

Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.

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

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

Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.

He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto.

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.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.

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.

That's how women are with me " said Paul. "They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.

The old ideals are dead as nails--nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman--sort of ultimate marriage--and there isn't anything else.

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

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

Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.

[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, "We are one in the Father: we will go back." The Northern races said, "We are one in Christ, we will go on.

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.

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.

When man has nothing but his will to assert--even his good-will--it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.

Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.