D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.

Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame... She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

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

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.

She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.

It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.

They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.

Whatever men you take, keep the idea of man intact: let your soul wait whether your body does or not.

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

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.

The picture must all come out of the artist's inside, awareness of forms and figures... It is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.

Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.

Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed.... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage.

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.

What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me.

It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.

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

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.

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

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint.

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

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

It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!" she said.

There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that