David Herbert Lawrence – 51 Quotes

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51 Quotes by David Herbert Lawrence

 

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

– David Herbert Lawrence


God is only a great imaginative experience.

– David Herbert Lawrence


Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

– David Herbert Lawrence


Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

– David Herbert Lawrence


In every living thing there is the desire for love.

– David Herbert Lawrence


The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

– David Herbert Lawrence


People always make war when they say they love peace.

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

– David Herbert Lawrence


The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– David Herbert Lawrence


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

– 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


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

– 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


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

– 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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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 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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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.

– 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


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


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.

– 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


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


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