D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.

D. H. Lawrence
Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon.... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.

D. H. Lawrence
For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.

D. H. Lawrence
The acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear

D. H. Lawrence
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent.

D. H. Lawrence
A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. He that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.

D. H. Lawrence
The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language.

D. H. Lawrence
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

D. H. Lawrence
It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.

D. H. Lawrence
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.

D. H. Lawrence
Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

D. H. Lawrence
Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.

D. H. Lawrence
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

D. H. Lawrence
If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.

D. H. Lawrence
Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.

D. H. Lawrence
Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness. And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.

D. H. Lawrence
But the pressure was too great. He would have to find something to make good the equilibrium. Something must come with him into the hollow void of death in his soul, fill it up, and so equalise the pressure within to the pressure without. For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble...

D. H. Lawrence
If you don't like it, alter it, and if you can't alter it, put up with it.

D. H. Lawrence
Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.

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

D. H. Lawrence