D.H. Lawrence Quotes on Man (19 Quotes)


    Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare.

    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.

    Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass.


    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.



    What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

    I believe a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are bor

    Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the ''dragon,'' in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.

    Marriage is a long event of perpetual change in which a man and a woman mutually build up their souls and make themselves whole.

    No man is or can be purely individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They ar

    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.

    The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

    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.

    You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.

    It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread for grain is grass and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.

    This is what I believe That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.

    Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, be.

    He liked to watch his fellow-clerks at work. The man was the work and the work was the man, one thing, for the time being. It was different with the girls. The real woman never seemed to be there at the task, but as if left out, waiting.


    More D.H. Lawrence Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - Woman - War & Peace - World - Work & Career - Soul - Art - God - Time - Mind - Death & Dying - People - Nature - Self - Emotions - Belief & Faith - Love - America - View All D.H. Lawrence Quotations

    More D.H. Lawrence Quotations (By Book Titles)


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