Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit.... this that I tell you is my message as far as I've got any.

You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.

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.

I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.

I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.