Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
D. H. LawrenceA museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
D. H. LawrenceI'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow...it is the honest state before the apple.
D. H. LawrenceWe only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.
D. H. Lawrence