D. H. Lawrence Quotes

523 Sourced Quotes

Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.

D. H. Lawrence
She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.

D. H. Lawrence
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

D. H. Lawrence
She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

D. H. Lawrence
It is marriage, perhaps, which had given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the state.... It is a true freedom because it is a true fulfilment, for man, woman and children. Do we then want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State.

D. H. Lawrence
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.

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
Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.

D. H. Lawrence
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

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
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
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.

D. H. Lawrence
This is beyond me, this fish, His God stands outside my God.

D. H. Lawrence
It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

D. H. Lawrence
He was a little model, was Benjamin. Doctor Franklin. Snuff-colored little man! Immortal soul and all!

D. H. Lawrence
You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

D. H. Lawrence
Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.

D. H. Lawrence
Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
lost bride and her groom.

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

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

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
The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

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

D. H. Lawrence
Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.

D. H. Lawrence
Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them... But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

D. H. Lawrence