D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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