D.H. Lawrence Quotes & Sayings

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

A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone. — D.H. Lawrence

So I lay on your breast for an obscure hour Feeling your fingers go Like a rhythmic breeze Over my hair, and tracing my brows, Till I knew you not from a little wind: - I wonder now if God allows Us only one moment of his keys. If only then You could have unlocked the moon on the night, And I baptized myself in the light Of your love; we both have entered then the white Pure passion, and never again. — D.H. Lawrence

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it. — D.H. Lawrence

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. — D.H. Lawrence

Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took cover under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges. — D.H. Lawrence

Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage. — D.H. Lawrence

For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to a star, or you will just stay where you are. — D.H. Lawrence

What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist. — D.H. Lawrence

Quite frantically, he longed not to be. — D.H. Lawrence

Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind. — D.H. Lawrence

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality. — D.H. Lawrence

Messina between the volcanoes, Etna and Stromboli, having known the death-agony's terror. I always dread coming near the awful place, yet I have found the people kind, almost feverishly so, as if they knew the awful need for kindness. — D.H. Lawrence

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man. — D.H. Lawrence

We are afraid of the instincts. We are afraid of the intuition within us. We suppress the instincts, and we cut off our intuitional awareness from one another and from the world. The reason being some great shock to the procreative self. Now we know one another only as ideal or social or political entities, fleshless, bloodless and cold like Bernard Shaw's creatures. Intuitively we are dead to one another, we have all gone cold. But by intuition alone can man really be aware of man, or of the living, substantial world. By intuition alone can man love and know either woman or world, and by intuition alone can he bring forth images of the magic awareness which we call art. — D.H. Lawrence

You've got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unkowingness, and give up your volition ... You've got to learn not-to-be before you can come into being. — D.H. Lawrence

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over. — D.H. Lawrence

All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day. — D.H. Lawrence

The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence. — D.H. Lawrence

The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice. — D.H. Lawrence

If it doesn't absorb you, if it isn't any fun, don't do it. — D.H. Lawrence

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. — D.H. Lawrence

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means. — D.H. Lawrence

But I will have it. I will love - it is my birthright. I will love the man I marry - that is all I care about. — D.H. Lawrence

People always make war when they say they love peace. — D.H. Lawrence

The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it. — D.H. Lawrence

The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell
and paints the inside walls sky-blue
and blocks up the door
and says he's in heaven. — D.H. Lawrence

There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond. — D.H. Lawrence

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women, as they alwayshave done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it's because she doesn't quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man's picture of woman to live up to. — D.H. Lawrence

From the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and ... the fulfilling of those desires is the fulfilling of creation. — D.H. Lawrence

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

Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare. — D.H. Lawrence

I cannot be a materialist - but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery - such suffering, such dreadful suffering - and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all? — D.H. Lawrence

If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishab — D.H. Lawrence

Une immense esprance a travers la terre', he read somewhere, and his comment was:'
and it's darned-well drowned everything worth having. — D.H. Lawrence

Had you noticed them before?" he asked.
"No, never before," she replied.
"And now you will always see them," he said. — D.H. Lawrence

In the depths of him, he too didn't want to go. But he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was Life. — D.H. Lawrence

He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was the angels smiling on him. — D.H. Lawrence

I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me
and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist. — D.H. Lawrence

The rabbit presses back her ears, Turns back her liquid, anguished eyes And crouches low: then with wild spring Spurts from the terror of his oncoming To be choked back, the wire ring Her frantic effort throttling: Piteous brown ball of quivering fears! — D.H. Lawrence

Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one's own life. — D.H. Lawrence

A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new. — D.H. Lawrence

The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself. — D.H. Lawrence

For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar. — D.H. Lawrence

If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them. — D.H. Lawrence

She felt unpeeled and rather exposed. She felt almost improper. — D.H. Lawrence

Ours is not an everyday affection.As yet we are mortal and to live side by side with one another would be dreadful, for somehow with you I cannot long be trivial, and you know to be always beyond this mortal state would be to lose it.If people marry, they must live together as two affectionate human beings ... not as souls. — D.H. Lawrence

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

Time went on. Whatever happened, nothing happened, because she was so beautifully out of contact. She and Clifford lived in their ideas and his books. She entertained. there were always people in the house. Time went on as the clock does, half past eight instead of half past seven. — D.H. Lawrence

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness. — D.H. Lawrence

Don't ask me anything about the future," he said miserably. "I don't know anything. Be with me now, will you, no matter what it is?" And she took him in her arms. — D.H. Lawrence

She did not look her best: so thin, so large-nosed, with that pink-and-white checked duster tied round her head. She felt her disadvantage. But she had had a good deal of suffering and sorrow, she did not mind any more. — D.H. Lawrence

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

For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them. — D.H. Lawrence

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water. — D.H. Lawrence

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. — D.H. Lawrence

The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all. — D.H. Lawrence

Supreme pleasure?' she said, looking up at him. 'Is that sort of idiocy the supreme pleasure of the life of the mind? No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.' He — D.H. Lawrence

Men don't think, high and low-alike, they take what a woman does for them for granted. — 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

Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays, you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days. — D.H. Lawrence

You feel free in Australia. There is great relief in the atmosphere - a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form. The Skies open above you and the areas open around you. — D.H. Lawrence

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! — D.H. Lawrence

And the souls in Plato riding up to heaven in a two-horse chariot would go in a Ford car now,' she — D.H. Lawrence

I am quite empty of feeling. I don't care the slightest bit in the world for anybody or anything except myself. But I do care for myself, and I'm going to survive in spite of them all, and I'm going to have my own success without caring the least in the world how I get it. Because I'm cleverer than they are, I'm cunninger than they are, even if I'm weak. I must build myself up proper protections, and entrench myself, and then I'm safe. I can sit inside my glass tower and feel nothing and be touched by nothing, and yet exert my power, my will, through the glass walls of my ego. — D.H. Lawrence

Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten show. But mind you, it's like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. you've severed the connexion between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are the plucked apple ... you've fallen off the tree. And then it is logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad. — D.H. Lawrence

Aaron Sisson was the last man on the little black railway-line — D.H. Lawrence

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it. — D.H. Lawrence

You know, he said, with an effort, 'if one person loves, the other does.'
... 'I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,' she said.
'Yes, but it is - at least with most people,' he answered. — D.H. Lawrence

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune. — D.H. Lawrence

He had read in the newspaper satirical remarks about initial-carvers, who could find no other road to immortality. — D.H. Lawrence

The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist ... When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness. — D.H. Lawrence

She, herself, was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors. — D.H. Lawrence

Let a person only approach his or her own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free ... The creative spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate. — D.H. Lawrence

Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it, he said. And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better. — D.H. Lawrence

Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've
got none to spend. That's our civilization and our education: bring up
the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money
gives out. — D.H. Lawrence

It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics ... Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose in cruelty against themselves, admitting that they are pandering to, and despising, the lower self. — 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

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

Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people. — D.H. Lawrence

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

It's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money, but if you're born lucky, you will always have more money. — D.H. Lawrence

A man can only be happy following his own inmost need. — D.H. Lawrence

The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse. — D.H. Lawrence

Sufficient unto the moment is the appearance of reality. — D.H. Lawrence

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. — D.H. Lawrence

Isn't love the most horrible thing! I think it's just horrible. it just does one in, and turns one into a sort of howling animal. — D.H. Lawrence

Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness ... meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object. — D.H. Lawrence

They were mere permutations of known quantities. There was no roundness or fullness in this world he now inhabited, everything was a dead shape mental arrangement, without life or being. — D.H. Lawrence

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night — D.H. Lawrence

The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth. — D.H. Lawrence

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. — D.H. Lawrence

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

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

There's so much of you here with me, really, it's a pity you aren't all here. — D.H. Lawrence

[Man's] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun,rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun. — D.H. Lawrence

Instead of men kissing you, and touching you, they revealed their minds to you. It was great fun! But what cold minds! — D.H. Lawrence

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

We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, andis an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last. — D.H. Lawrence

She was old; millions of years old, she felt. — D.H. Lawrence