Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.
The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.
The picture must all come out of the artist's inside, awareness of forms and figures... It is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.
He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.
And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.
Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.
It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.