D. h. lawrence quotes

The living moment is everything.

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.

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.

If you don't like it, alter it, and if you can't alter it, put up with it.

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board

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.

Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.

Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man.

The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.

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

God doesn't know things. He is things.

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.

It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman - who is much of a woman - is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.

Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

The dead don't die. They look on and help.

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.

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.

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

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.

I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.

The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal. Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two are separate and never to be confused.

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

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.

The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

When science starts to be interpretive it is more unscientific even than mysticism.

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

There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.

Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.

While we live, let us live.

There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

When love turns into dust, money becomes the substitution.

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

People always make war when they say they love peace.

You live by what you thrill to, and there's the end of it.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

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

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise 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.

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.

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

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

What sex is, we don't know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty. We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.

Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.

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.

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

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

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

no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death

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.

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

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

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

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.

One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.

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

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

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

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.

Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.

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.

I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.

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

How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.

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

In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation.

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

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.

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me.

If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.

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

What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.

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.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale.

Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?

Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.

The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.

When I went to the scientific doctor I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me and reduce me to the level of a thing. So I said: Good-morning! and left him.

Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.

We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

You're spending your life without renewing it. You've got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You're spending your vitality without making any. Can't go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

Man is a thought-adventurer.

Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.

It's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money, but if you're born lucky, you will always have more money.

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.

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.

The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.

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

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for 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.

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the 'Hallelujah Chorus'.

The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.

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

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

We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.

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.

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.

The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.

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

You've got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.

If it doesn't absorb you, if it isn't any fun, don't do it.

One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.