Top 80 D. H. Lawrence Quotes

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn’t got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

It’s bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind – intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.

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

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

Europe’s the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.

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.

I shall always be a priest of love.

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.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

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.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

God doesn’t know things. He is things.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.

Having achieved and accomplished love… man… has become himself, his tale is told.

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!

One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.

I am in love – and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

Don’t be on the side of the angels, it’s too lowering.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies – thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can’t wake up.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

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.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

I can’t do with mountains at close quarters – they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

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.

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.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

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.

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.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art – or almost the only stuff.

My God, these folks don’t know how to love – that’s why they love so easily.