D. H. Lawrence's Quotes

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

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

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

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

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

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

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

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

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

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.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.