D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

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 it was not a Word, but a chirrup.

D. H. Lawrence
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

D. H. Lawrence
I can't stand Willy wet-leg,
can't stand him at any price.
He's resigned, and when you hit him
he lets you hit him twice.

D. H. Lawrence
I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.

D. H. Lawrence
How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.

D. H. Lawrence
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.

D. H. Lawrence
Unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.

D. H. Lawrence
I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me.

D. H. Lawrence
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.

D. H. Lawrence
I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

D. H. Lawrence
One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.

D. H. Lawrence
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.

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

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

D. H. Lawrence
The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. 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.

D. H. Lawrence
I love Frieda so much I don't like to talk about it. I never knew what love was before.... 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.

D. H. Lawrence
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

D. H. Lawrence
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.

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

D. H. Lawrence
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.

D. H. Lawrence
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 luster.

D. H. Lawrence
Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

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

D. H. Lawrence
I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.

D. H. Lawrence
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.

D. H. Lawrence
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

D. H. Lawrence
The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

D. H. Lawrence
That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him.

D. H. Lawrence
Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness.... It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.

D. H. Lawrence
We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, andis an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last.

D. H. Lawrence