Whence come these hatreds...? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, read more

Whence come these hatreds...? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others- and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch.

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a read more

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

Evil witnesses are eyes and ears of men, if they have souls that do not understand their language.

Evil witnesses are eyes and ears of men, if they have souls that do not understand their language.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.

The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort read more

The true function of art is to...edit nature and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proofreader, blue-penciling the bad spelling of God.

Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. read more

Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man read more

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.

Dare to be wrong and to dream.

Dare to be wrong and to dream.

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man read more

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.