D.H. Lawrence Quotes

Whatever men you take, keep the idea of man intact: let your soul wait whether your body does or not.

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.

Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.

And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.

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.

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

His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring as the phallus, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited.

It's only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

But he would protect her with his heart for a little while. For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanised greed did them both in, her as well as him.

There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of -vast ranges of experience, like humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us.

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.

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

I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict.

For God's sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.
Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

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

While we live, let us live.

I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.

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.

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.

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?

The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease. She

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

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.

Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor, insignificant, moist little penis.

Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him.

Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.

Connie went for walks in the park, and in the woods that joined the park, and enjoyed the solitude and the mystery, kicked the brown leaves of autumn, and picked the primroses of spring. But it was all a dream; or rather it was like the simulacrum of reality. The oak leaves were to her like oak-leaves seen ruffling in a mirror, she herself was a figure somebody had read about, picking primroses that were only shadows or memories, or words. No substance to her or anything ... no touch, no contact!

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into
are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing
for long years.
And for this reason, some old things are lovely
warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the celandines at the wood's edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled out bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor. 'The world has grown pale with thy breath.' But it was the breath of Persephone, this time; she came out of hell on a cold morning. Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked, bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding themselves.

One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.

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.

DEMOCRACY OF TOUCH - instead of a democracy of pocket.

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.

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

Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.

One should stick by one's soul, and by nothing else. In one's soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one's own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.

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

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.

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 connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple ... you've fallen off the tree.

It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.

So it is. Once a book is fathomed, once it is known, and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. A book only lives while it has power to move us, and move us differently; so long as we find it different every time we read it. Owing to the flood of shallow books which really are exhausted in one reading, the modern mind tends to think every book is the same, finished in one reading. But it is not so. And gradually the modern mind will realize it again. The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning. It is, as usual, a question of values: we are so overwhelmed with quantities of books that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books. Because if a certain book can call you to read it six times, it will be a deeper and deeper experience each time, and will enrich the whole soul, emotional and mental.

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.

I'll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

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

I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.

She was a flower that has been tempted forth into blossom, and has no retreat. He had her nakedness in his power. And who was he, what was he? A blind thing, a dark force, without knowledge. She wanted to preserve herself.

Then she gathered him to herself again and was satisfied for a moment. But as time went on, she began to realize more and more that he did not alter, that he was something dark, alien to herself. She had thought him just the bright reflex of herself. As the weeks and months went by she realized that he was a dark opposite to her, that they were opposites, not complements.

He did not alter, he remained separately himself, and he seemed to expect her to be part of himself, the extension of his will. She felt him trying to gain power over her, without knowing her. What did he want? Was he going to bully her?

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.

I want to find you, where you don't know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly.

Awful things men were, savage, cruel, underneath their civilization.

And to my lips' Bright crimson rim The passion slips, And down my slim White body drips The shining hymn ...

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night

You must always be a-waggle with LOVE.

In my very own self, I am part of my family.

And yet - and yet - one's kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.

I really do not want to be forced into all this criticism and analysis of life. I really do want to see things in their entirety, with their beauty left to them, and their wholeness, their natural holiness.Don't you feel it, don't you feel you can't be tortured into any more knowledge?

The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself. The moment its isolation breaks down, and there comes an actual mixing and confusion, death sets in.

At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.

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

And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.

You know," he said to his mother, "I don't want to belong to the well-to-do middle class. I like my common people best. I belong to the common people." - Sons and Lovers

You know, love isn't the twin-soul business. With you, for instance, women are like apples on a tree. You can have one that you can reach. Those that look best are overhead, but it's no good bothering with them. So you stretch up, perhaps you pull down a bough and just get your fingers round a good one. Then it swings back and you feel wild and you say your heart's broken. But there are plenty of apples as good for you no higher than your chest.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.
Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

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.

We can understand that the Fathers of the Church in the East wanted Apocalypse left out of the New Testament. But like Judas among the disciples, it was inevitable that it should be included. The Apocalypse is the feet of clay to the grand Christian image. And down crashes the image, on the weakness of these very feet. There is Jesus
but there is also John the Divine. There is Christian love
and there is Christian envy. The former would "save" the world
the latter will never be satisfied till it has destroyed the world. They are two sides of the same medal.

He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto.

There's nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.

If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It's gay and gospel truth to me..

All human beings are vines. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is a mere potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us.

Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.

The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.

Every man has made a ghastly fool of himself with a woman at some time or other.

The army leaves me time to think, and saves me from the battle of life.

The picture must all come out of the artist's inside. It is the image that lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.

Why must one climb the hill ? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one's way up the slope? Why force one's way up and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very tiring, very wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens.

With Mrs. Morel it was one of those still moments when the small frets vanish, and the beauty of things stands out, and she had the peace and the strength to see herself.

No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.

Freedom is a very great reality, but it means above all things, freedom from lies.

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.

She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman - you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us.

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.

Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure.

So slowly the hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.

She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him. 'Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?' she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around.

We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

You can't lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.

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

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.

The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.

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

(...) and a story meant money. (...) If you were young, you just set your teeth, and bit on and held on, till the money began to flow from the invisible; it was a question of power. It was a question of will; a subtle, subtle powerful emanation of will out of yourself brought back to you the mysterious nothingness of money: a word on a piece of paper.