Quotes by Lawrence, D. H.

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on decadence
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"You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies."

Lawrence, D. H. on democracy   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on democracy   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on design   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on effort   

"Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."

Lawrence, D. H. on endurance   

"The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent."

Lawrence, D. H. on equality   

"Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar."

Lawrence, D. H. on ethics   

"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."

Lawrence, D. H. on evil   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on exile   

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

Lawrence, D. H. on flowers   

"Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. 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. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was."

Lawrence, D. H. on freedom   

"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority."

Lawrence, D. H. on generations   

"America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact."

Lawrence, D. H. on america   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on america   

"God is only a great imaginative experience."

Lawrence, D. H. on god
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"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?"

Lawrence, D. H. on god   

"Never trust the teller, trust the tale."

Lawrence, D. H. on gossip
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"The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man."

Lawrence, D. H. on horses   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on humankind   

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

Lawrence, D. H. on insects   

"Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him."

Lawrence, D. H. on institutions   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on intelligence and intellectuals   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on intuition   

"I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter."

Lawrence, D. H. on letters   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on death   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on life   

"Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts."

Lawrence, D. H. on animals   

"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."

Lawrence, D. H. on criticism   

"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!"

Lawrence, D. H. on literature   

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

Lawrence, D. H. on literature   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on love
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"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on love   

"Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless."

Lawrence, D. H. on love
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"I shall always be a priest of love."

Lawrence, D. H. on love   

"My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily."

Lawrence, D. H. on love
8 fans of this quote   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on marriage   

"How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression."

Lawrence, D. H. on men   

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

Lawrence, D. H. on women
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Lawrence, D. H. on women