Top 699 Quotes & Sayings by D. H. Lawrence - Page 10

So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.

Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven.

Death is ... a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot.

How can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won't sell at any price?

Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play.

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

For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean?

I don't like your miserable lonely single front name. It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.

I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me--and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

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.

It is our business to go as we are impelled.

I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.

You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.

We can understand that the Fathers of the Church in the East wanted Apocalypse left out of the New Testament. But like Judas among the disciples, it was inevitable that it should be included. The Apocalypse is the feet of clay to the grand Christian image. And down crashes the image, on the weakness of these very feet. There is Jesus--but there is also John the Divine. There is Christian love--and there is Christian envy. The former would "save" the world--the latter will never be satisfied till it has destroyed the world. They are two sides of the same medal.

I wonder which was more frightened among old tribes -- those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests.

America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.

Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.

The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.

The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.

It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.

Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfillment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana. That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.

Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.

For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery

Only youth has a taste of immortality.

And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.

It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.

Where sanity is there God is.

Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes.

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.

I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict.

What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance.

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw The blind to hide the garden, where the moon Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon. And I do lift my aching arms to you, And I do lift my anguished, avid breast, And I do weep for very pain of you, And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.

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 race, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family.

To our senses, the elements are four and have ever been, and will ever be for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception, the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the World. To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory and hunt them down. But the four we have always with us, they are our world. Or rather, they have us with them.

Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh.

And then she realized that his presence was the wall, his presence was destroying her. Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall. She must break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life to the last. It must be done, or she must perish most horribly.

A man will part with anything so long as he's drunk, and you're drunk with him.

The great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living termsonce had a vast and perhaps perfect science of itsown, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.

How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

Anatomy presupposes a corpse; psychology presupposes a world of corpses.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats By the Ponte Vecchio . . . Changing guard.

The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct — and societal repression much more devastating.

I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.

The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in ''the people.'' One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.