D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.

D. H. Lawrence
A lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening no doubt to the sounding of spheres. And what a dandy fellow! The right toss of a chin for you And swirl of a tail! If men were as much men as lizards are lizards they'd be worth looking at.

D. H. Lawrence
Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don't get on very well with the world.

D. H. Lawrence
You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister.

D. H. Lawrence
Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.

D. H. Lawrence
I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint.

D. H. Lawrence
Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
lost bride and her groom.

D. H. Lawrence
It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh.

D. H. Lawrence
I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.

D. H. Lawrence
When I went to the scientific doctor
I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me
and reduce me to the level of a thing.
So I said: Good-morning! and left him.

D. H. Lawrence
We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

D. H. Lawrence
Most men have a deadness in them that frightens me so because of my own deadness. Why can't men get their life straight, like St.Mawr, and then think? Why can't they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do?

D. H. Lawrence
Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.

D. H. Lawrence
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.

D. H. Lawrence
I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

D. H. Lawrence
The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables - piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes... long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness....

D. H. Lawrence
There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.

D. H. Lawrence
I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.

D. H. Lawrence
The mind is "ashamed" of the blood. And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually. Hence palefaces.

D. H. Lawrence
I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

D. H. Lawrence
I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow...it is the honest state before the apple.

D. H. Lawrence
The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.

D. H. Lawrence
How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.

D. H. Lawrence
Now all science starts gaily from the inland source of I don't know. Gaily it says: I don't know, but I'm going to know. It's like a little river bubbling up cheerfully in the determination to dissolve the whole world in its waves. And science, like the little river, winds wanderingly out again into the final I don't know of the ocean.

D. H. Lawrence
We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make 'em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.

D. H. Lawrence
Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.

D. H. Lawrence
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.

D. H. Lawrence
Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.

D. H. Lawrence
The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose.

D. H. Lawrence
And whoever forces himself to love anybody
begets a murderer in his own body.

D. H. Lawrence