Top 55 D. H. Lawrence Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

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

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

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.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

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.

Don’t be on the side of the angels, it’s too lowering.

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.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

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

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

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

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

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

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.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

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

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

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

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.

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.

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.

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

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

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.

Europe’s the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.

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.

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

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.

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.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

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.

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

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

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

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.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

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.

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

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.