Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer D. H. Lawrence.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer, novelist, poet and essayist. His works reflect on modernity, industrialization, sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. His best known novels—Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover—notably concerned gay and lesbian relationships, and were the subject of censorship trials.
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.
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
People always make war when they say they love peace.
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.
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
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.
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.
In every living thing there is the desire for 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.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
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.
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.
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
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.
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
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.
One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
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.
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.
The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
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.
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
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.
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.
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.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
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.
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.
I shall always be a priest of love.
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.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.