H D Lawrence Quotes & Sayings

When science starts to be interpretive
it is more unscientific even than mysticism. — D.H. Lawrence

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. — D.H. Lawrence

Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it. — D.H. Lawrence

Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere. — D.H. Lawrence

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. — D.H. Lawrence

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision
and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness,
more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort.
An Augean stable of metallic filth. — D.H. Lawrence

In every living thing there is the desire for love. — D.H. Lawrence

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America
as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong. — 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

What sex is, we don't know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty. We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world. — D.H. Lawrence

It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. — D.H. Lawrence

The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor. — D.H. Lawrence

Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being. — D.H. Lawrence

And then she realized that his presence was the wall, his presence was destroying her. Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall. She must break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life to the last. It must be done, or she must perish most horribly. — 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

There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder. — D.H. Lawrence

To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night, and death, and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like BEING. To be alive, to be urgent and insistent
that was NOT-TO-BE. The highest of all was to melt out into the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being. — D.H. Lawrence

You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. — D.H. Lawrence

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life. — D.H. Lawrence

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was. — D.H. Lawrence

You see,' he said, 'I always imagine our being really happy with some few other people - a little freedom with people.'

She pondered for a moment.

'Yes, one does want that. But it must happen. You can't do anything for it with your will. You always seem to think you can force the flowers to come out. People must love us because they love us - you can't make them.'

'I know,' he said. 'But must one take no steps at all? Must one just go as if one were alone in the world - the only creature in the world? — D.H. Lawrence

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd. — D.H. Lawrence

Only she began to be afraid of the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the park. — 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

The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it. — 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

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. — D.H. Lawrence

Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don't get on very well with the world. — D.H. Lawrence

All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity. — D.H. Lawrence

I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame. — D.H. Lawrence

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only
weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration! — D.H. Lawrence

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

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much. — D.H. Lawrence

Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. — 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

The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy. — D.H. Lawrence

If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides. — D.H. Lawrence

The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the winds, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret. — D.H. Lawrence

The fractured self is not something that needs to be rectified fixed and made whole; by freeing thought of the blinkers of representation, the space of fracture, of multiplicity (as opposed to unity) becomes a powerful place and one from which the most radical ideas can emerge. — Ria Banerjee

D. H. Lawrence described our Western culture as being like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. "We are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs," he wrote, "we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal." We come alive as we rediscover the truth of our goodness and our natural connectedness to all of life. Our "greater needs" are met in relating lovingly with each other, relating with full presence to each moment, relating to the beauty and pain that is within and around us. — Tara Brach

Be a good animal,true to your instincts. — D.H. Lawrence

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods. — D.H. Lawrence

He had become a settled effect in her spirit, a state permanently established, not continuous, but always recurring. — 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

Life is beautiful, so long as it is consuming you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is glorious. It is best to roar away, like a fire with a great draught, white-hot to the last bit. — D.H. Lawrence

She did not understand the beauty he found in her, through touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision. — D.H. Lawrence

Ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn — D.H. Lawrence

The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens. — D.H. Lawrence

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be ... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else. — D.H. Lawrence

(...) he was beginning to be himself. And now he wanted madly to be free to go on. A home, his work, and absolute freedom to move and to be, in her, with her, this was his passionate desire. He thought in a kind of ecstasy, living an hour of painful intensity. — D.H. Lawrence

Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit ... this that I tell you is my message as far as I've got any. — D.H. Lawrence

How she hated words, always coming between her and her life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the live-sap out of living things. — D.H. Lawrence

The more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself. — D.H. Lawrence

William had to be at his office at eight, so his mother got up at seven o' clock to prepare him. He was usually late, or on the verge of lateness. But nothing could hurry him. — D.H. Lawrence

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

Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. — 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

I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to yourself, so we are found different. — D.H. Lawrence

Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion? ... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions. — D.H. Lawrence

I cannot get any sense of an enemy - only of a disaster. — D.H. Lawrence

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. — 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

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life's mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. — D.H. Lawrence

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha — D.H. Lawrence

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent. — D.H. Lawrence

Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life! — D.H. Lawrence

Well,' he said, 'I don't know. What's the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don't desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don't take me as a general example, probably I'm just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don't love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretence of love, or an entangled appearance. — D.H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence's "Never trust the teller. Trust the tale" is always right. — Greil Marcus

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

Special natures you must give a special world. — D.H. Lawrence

He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing. — D.H. Lawrence

As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness in her life that affected her. — D.H. Lawrence

There was a glimmer of nightly rabbits across the ground. — D.H. Lawrence

It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education. — D.H. Lawrence

Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness ... It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep. — D.H. Lawrence

That's the place to get to - nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world's somewheres, into our own nowhere. — D.H. Lawrence

The history of the cosmos
is the history of the struggle of becoming.
When the dim flux of unformed life
struggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself,
and broke at last into light and dark
came into existence as light,
came into existence as cold shadow
then every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight. — D.H. Lawrence

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being. — D.H. Lawrence

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul. — D.H. Lawrence

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. — 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

It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh. — 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 you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing. — Shelby Foote

What's that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time! — D.H. Lawrence

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. — D.H. Lawrence

You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister. — D.H. Lawrence

He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened. — D.H. Lawrence

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes? — Joyce Carol Oates

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster. — D.H. Lawrence

Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. — D.H. Lawrence

Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven. — D.H. Lawrence

everywhere for it. And, as she sought, the conviction came into her heart that her husband had taken it. What she had in her purse was all the money — D.H. Lawrence

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. — D.H. Lawrence

I shall always be a priest of love. — D.H. Lawrence

There was nothing now but this empty treadmill of what Clifford called the integrated life, the long living together of two people, who are in the habit of being in the same house with one another.
Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness! — D.H. Lawrence

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

Exactly, I will lay down the law for nobody, not even myself. The thought of death and the afterlife saves me from doing any more ... As the thought of Eternity helps me. — D.H. Lawrence

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. — D.H. Lawrence