Famous David Herbert Lawrence Quotations

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"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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!"
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"God is only a great imaginative experience."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"God doesn't know things. He is things."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"I shall always be a priest of love."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Men! The only animal in the world to fear."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Money is our madness, our vast collective madness."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Only in a novel are all things given full play."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?"
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert 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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"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."
by David Herbert Lawrence
"We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with."
by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
"The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and made their own bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loafs seem,so perfumes, as home-made bread used to be before the war."
by D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence


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