D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.

The acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.

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

Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances.

No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.

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

The east is not for me--the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes.

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.

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.

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these personaltimes.

Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.

Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't?.... It's the courage of your own tenderness.

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.

If it doesn't absorb you, if it isn't any fun, don't do it.

In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No, the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.

The dead don't die. They look on and help.

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.

How the horse dominated the mind of the early races especially of the Mediterranean! You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances...The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action in man!

For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

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

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.

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.

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.

That's how women are with me " said Paul. "They want me like mad but they don't want to belong to me.

Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.

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.

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution,the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?.... There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single beingwhich accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.

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

One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.

Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.

The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

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.

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.

Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

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.