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Quotes 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.
– 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.
– David Herbert 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
– David Herbert Lawrence
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
– David Herbert Lawrence
But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
– David Herbert Lawrence
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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
– David Herbert 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
God is only a great imaginative experience.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I am in love - and, my God, it's 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 haven't done so already. You are wasting your life.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I shall always be a priest of love.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
– David Herbert Lawrence
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
– David Herbert Lawrence
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
– David Herbert Lawrence
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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
– David Herbert Lawrence
My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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!
– David Herbert Lawrence
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
– David Herbert Lawrence
People always make war when they say they love peace.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
– David Herbert 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.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
– 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.
– David Herbert 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.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
– David Herbert Lawrence
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
– David Herbert Lawrence
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
– David Herbert Lawrence
But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
– David Herbert Lawrence
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
– David Herbert Lawrence
They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
– 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.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
– David Herbert Lawrence
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
– David Herbert Lawrence