D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

Money is a sort of instinct. It's a sort of property of nature in a person to make money. It's nothing you do. It's no trick you play. It's a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on... But you've got to begin... You've got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You've got to beat your way in. Once you've done that, you can't help it!

D. H. Lawrence
The Etruscans are not a theory or a thesis. If anything, they are an experience.

D. H. Lawrence
The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.

D. H. Lawrence
Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

D. H. Lawrence
It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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