D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these personaltimes.

D. H. Lawrence
Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't?.... It's the courage of your own tenderness.

D. H. Lawrence
The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.

D. H. Lawrence
I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict.

D. H. Lawrence
If we lose our sanity... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.

D. H. Lawrence
Europe is, perhaps, the least worn-out of the continents, because it is the most lived in. A place that is lived in lives.

D. H. Lawrence
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

D. H. Lawrence
Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat.
Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.

D. H. Lawrence
Sometimes snakes can't slough. They can't burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don't care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

D. H. Lawrence
In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends--give me the country.

D. H. Lawrence
How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed....

D. H. Lawrence
It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.

D. H. Lawrence
Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united...

D. H. Lawrence
At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio...
Changing guard.

D. H. Lawrence
Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.

D. H. Lawrence
One man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.

D. H. Lawrence
I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.

D. H. Lawrence
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.

D. H. Lawrence
It's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money, but if you're born lucky, you will always have more money.

D. H. Lawrence
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods.

D. H. Lawrence
It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die.

D. H. Lawrence
A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

D. H. Lawrence
That she bear children is not a woman's significance.
But that she bear herself,
that is her supreme and risky fate.

D. H. Lawrence
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.

D. H. Lawrence
Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfillment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana. That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.

D. H. Lawrence
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.

D. H. Lawrence
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

D. H. Lawrence
Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed.... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage.

D. H. Lawrence
Along the avenue of cypresses,
All in their scarlet cloaks and surplices
Of linen, go the chanting choristers,
The priests in gold and black, the villagers....

D. H. Lawrence
While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.

D. H. Lawrence