D. H. Lawrence Quotes
Most popular D. H. Lawrence Quotes
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
People always make war when they say they love peace.
The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.
Class makes a gulf, across which all the best human flow is lost.
I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.
Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.
Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.
The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.
Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.
Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of.
The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?
He was an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul.
Every human being is treacherous to every other human being because he has to be true to his own soul.
Sin is a queer thing. It isn't the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one's own integrity.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
America exhausts the springs of one's soul—I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
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.
I never knew how soothing trees are—many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.
Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.
I hate the actor-and-the-audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
If only we could have two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them.
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
If only one could have two lives: the first, in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they had to be made; and the second in which to profit by them.
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into luster.
And if tonight my soul may find her peace In sleep, and sink in good oblivion, And in the morning wake like a new-opened flower Then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
What sex is, we don't know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty.
California is a queer place—in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
One should stick by one's own soul, and by nothing else. In one's soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one's own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.
A man gradually formulates his religion, be it what it may. 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.
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not.
This is what I believe: "That I am I." "That my soul is a dark forest." "That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest." "That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back." "That I must have the courage to let them come and go." "That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women." There is my creed.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
I never saw a wild thing Sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough Without ever having felt sorry for itself.
