Top 699 Quotes & Sayings by D. H. Lawrence - Page 9

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.

You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.

One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God.

I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.

I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.

You don't learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can't you look at it with your clear simple wits?

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed.

I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.

I see a redness suddenly come Into the evening's anxious breast-- 'Tis the wound of love goes home!

I'll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.

I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.

Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.

I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.

Only the flow matters; live and let live, love and let love. There is no point in love.

Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.

Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women, as they alwayshave done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it's because she doesn't quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man's picture of woman to live up to.

The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.

America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.

He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.

At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.

I can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun...In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses - rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense.

But I like the feel of men on things, while they're alive. There's a feel of men about trucks, because they've been handled with men's hands, all of them.

But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to? It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.

The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.

Why does the thin grey strand Floating up from the forgotten Cigarette between my fingers, Why does it trouble me?

With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go ... but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there.

So slowly the hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.

The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought, Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt.

For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to a star, or you will just stay where you are.

Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup.

A house o' women is as dead as a house wi' no fire, to my thinkin'. I'm not a spider as likes to corner myself. I like a man about, if he's only something to snap at.

If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.

I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze.

Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.

Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep; And disgustingly upside down. Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags And grinning in their sleep. Bats!

What one does in one's art, that is the breath of one's being. What one does in one's life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.

Love's a dog in a manger.

Money is the seal and stamp of success.

The feelings I don't have I don't have. The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have. The felings you say you have, you don't have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.

Yea, Paris is a festive ton -- a festive Ton for all! Skate o'er on joy -- Thin crust of gilded, polished joy! What matters it if Hell's beneath?

I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

Along the avenue of cypresses, All in their scarlet cloaks and surplices Of linen, go the chanting choristers, The priests in gold and black, the villagers. . . .