D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.

D. H. Lawrence
The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.

D. H. Lawrence
For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

D. H. Lawrence
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!

D. H. Lawrence
One should be religious in everything, have God, whatever God might be, present in everything.

D. H. Lawrence
It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics.... Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose in cruelty against themselves, admitting that they are pandering to, and despising, the lower self.

D. H. Lawrence
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.

D. H. Lawrence
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.

D. H. Lawrence
Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.

And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.

D. H. Lawrence
That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.

D. H. Lawrence
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

D. H. Lawrence
Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.

D. H. Lawrence
The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.

D. H. Lawrence
Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

D. H. Lawrence
Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

D. H. Lawrence
A man will part with anything so long as he's drunk, and you're drunk with him.

D. H. Lawrence
At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.

D. H. Lawrence
That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.

D. H. Lawrence
Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won't fall off the tree when they're ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

D. H. Lawrence
Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.

D. H. Lawrence
The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.

D. H. Lawrence
The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.

D. H. Lawrence
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.

D. H. Lawrence
I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don't know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.

D. H. Lawrence
And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.

D. H. Lawrence
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.

D. H. Lawrence
Hate's a growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.

D. H. Lawrence
A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.

D. H. Lawrence
When passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable.

D. H. Lawrence
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.

D. H. Lawrence