Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

3. “What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.”

— D. H. Lawrence

4. “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

— D. H. Lawrence

5. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

6. “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.”

— D. H. Lawrence

7. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

8. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Breakup Quotes

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

— D. H. Lawrence

10. “There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

12. “The living moment is everything.”

— D. H. Lawrence

13. “Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.”

— D. H. Lawrence

14. “The great home of the soul is the open road.”

— D. H. Lawrence

15. “That she bear children is not a woman’s significance. But that she bear herself, that is her supreme and risky fate.”

— D. H. Lawrence

16. “But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”

— D. H. Lawrence

17. “Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

19. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

20. “The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

21. “The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.”

— D. H. Lawrence

22. “Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.”

— D. H. Lawrence

23. “Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.”

— D. H. Lawrence

24. “Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.”

— D. H. Lawrence

25. “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

26. “It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.”

— D. H. Lawrence

27. “Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?”

— D. H. Lawrence

28. “She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Patience Quotes

29. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

31. “Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.”

— D. H. Lawrence

32. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

33. “It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.”

— D. H. Lawrence

34. “The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Country Quotes

35. “Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

37. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Strong Quotes

39. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

41. “Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.”

— D. H. Lawrence

42. “A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.”

— D. H. Lawrence

43. “While we live, let us live.”

— D. H. Lawrence

44. “You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.”

— D. H. Lawrence

45. “Only the desert has a fascination – to ride alone – in the sun in the forever unpossessed country – away from man. That is a great temptation.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

49. “Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.”

— D. H. Lawrence

50. “Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness. And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.”

— D. H. Lawrence