D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.

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

D. H. Lawrence
No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.

D. H. Lawrence
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

D. H. Lawrence
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

D. H. Lawrence
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the "purpose" be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.

D. H. Lawrence
Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion?.... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions.

D. H. Lawrence
How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.

D. H. Lawrence
Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.

D. H. Lawrence
In America the chief accusation seems to be one of "Eroticism." This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty "amours," or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?

D. H. Lawrence
I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.

D. H. Lawrence
I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.

D. H. Lawrence
The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.

D. H. Lawrence
I see a redness suddenly come
Into the evening's anxious breast--
'Tis the wound of love goes home!

D. H. Lawrence
I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.--Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.

D. H. Lawrence
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

D. H. Lawrence
The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.

D. H. Lawrence
I can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun...In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses - rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense.

D. H. Lawrence
If you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a naturaland vital thing.

D. H. Lawrence
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.

D. H. Lawrence
A house o' women is as dead as a house wi' no fire, to my thinkin'. I'm not a spider as likes to corner myself. I like a man about, if he's only something to snap at.

D. H. Lawrence
You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in ''the people.'' One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.

D. H. Lawrence
The final aim is not to know, but to be.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. "Be yourself" is the last motto.

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

D. H. Lawrence
And still I look for the men who will dare to be
roses of England
wild roses of England
men who are wild roses of England
with metal thorns, beware!
but still more brave and still more rare
the courage of rosiness in a cabbage world
fragrance of roses in a stale stink of lies
rose-leaves to bewilder the clever fools
and rose-briars to strangle the machine.

D. H. Lawrence
The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

D. H. Lawrence
There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of -vast ranges of experience, like humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us.

D. H. Lawrence
Isn't it god's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

D. H. Lawrence
Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

D. H. Lawrence
Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that

D. H. Lawrence