D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

D. H. Lawrence
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?

D. H. Lawrence
The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

D. H. Lawrence
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into luster.

D. H. Lawrence
Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

D. H. Lawrence
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

D. H. Lawrence
I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.

D. H. Lawrence
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.

D. H. Lawrence
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.

D. H. Lawrence
The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.

D. H. Lawrence
That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him.

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

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

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

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
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