David Herbert Lawrence Quotes (152 Quotes)



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

    There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

    The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

    California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.


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


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



    Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

    I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.


    The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.

    The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

    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.

    Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

    Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

    One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.


    The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

    A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.


    Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.


    If my veins and my breasts with love embossed
    Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took.


    One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.




    The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.

    I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

    Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.



    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 he seemed to me again like a king, Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, Now due to be crowned again.



    So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

    If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

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

    Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

    I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

    Reach me a gentian, give me a torch Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

    The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.


    The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.



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