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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 human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
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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.
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We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
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Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more.
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Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united.
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God is only a great imaginative experience.
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The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
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Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh.
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The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.
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Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
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I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.
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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 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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Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
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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.
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It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
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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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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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Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
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If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
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Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
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People always make war when they say they love peace.
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Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.