D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

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.

For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit.... this that I tell you is my message as far as I've got any.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.

What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!

In masturbation there is nothing but loss.

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.

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

You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.

I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

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.

I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables - piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes . . . long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness. . . .

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a person to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on. . . But you've got to begin. . . You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it!

Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got sex into our head.

Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.

Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.

I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.

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.

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

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

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.

Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

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.

She let him come further, his lips came and surging, surging, soft, oh soft, yet on, like the powerful surge of water, irresistible, till with a little blind cry, she broke away.

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.

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

An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.

Freedom is a very great reality, but it means above all things, freedom from lies.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.

It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

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