D.H. Lawrence Quotes (118 Quotes)

The horse, the horse The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action.

The living self has one purpose only to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.

Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.

John Thomas says goodnight to Lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart

The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond - but I say, Diamond, what This is carbon.' And my diamond may be coal or soot and my theme is carbon.

For what is the beloved She is that which I myself am not. In the act of love, I am pure male, and she is pure female. She is she, and I am I, and clasped together with her, I know how perfectly she is not me, now perfectly I am not her, how utterly we are two, the light and the darkness, and how infinetly and eternally, not-to-be-comprehended by either of us is the surpassing One we make.

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.

No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb unless the lamb is inside.

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

The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.

It Mexico is a country where men despise sex, and live for it,' said Ramn. 'Which is suicide.'

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.

But then peace, peace I am so mistrustful of it so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.

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.

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.

We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.

In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you No, the two sovere

Blood is wiser than head.

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

It is not a pleasant epoch in one's life - the first forty eight hours at a large public school

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated It is sickening Why must all experience be systematized A museum is not a first-hand contact it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions

You may be the most liberal Liberal Englishman, and yet you cannot fail to see the categorical difference between the responsible and the irresponsible classes.

I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

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.

Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.

If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.

The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.

I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre.

It was cold, and he was coughing. A fine cold draught blew over the knoll. He thought of the woman. Now he would have given all he had or ever might have to hold her warm in his arms, both of them wrapped in one blanket, and sleep. All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.

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.

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.

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.

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me nor a theatre nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.

If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishab.

Every race which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has perished.

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great -- quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale.

Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.

America does to me what I knew it would do it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you - no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump bump go the trucks. And that is human contact.

It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.

Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.

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

What we want is some sort of communism not based on wages, nor profits, nor any sort of buying and selling but on a religion of life.

Take nothing, to say I have it For you can possess nothing, not even peace.

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.

We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that

The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.