David Herbert Lawrence Quotes (152 Quotes)

Have you built your ship of death, O have you O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

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

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days.

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.

How beastly the bourgeois is Especially the male of the species.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

As we live, we are transmitters of life.

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright and yet flowing And the intellect is just the light that is shed on the things around.

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.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

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

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

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.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

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

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

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.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

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

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

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.

Of life for love and love for life,
Of hunger for a little food,
Of kissing, lost for want of a wife
Long ago, long ago wooed.

Why were we crucified into sex?

God is only a great imaginative experience.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.... The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.