Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

— D. H. Lawrence

452. “The days passed, the weeks. But everything seemed to have fused, gone into a conglomerated mass. He could not tell one day from another, hardly one place from another. Nothing was distinct or distinguishable. Often he lost himself for an hour at a time, could not remember what he had done.”

— D. H. Lawrence

453. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

454. “Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.”

— D. H. Lawrence

455. “How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted.”

— D. H. Lawrence

456. “Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

457. “My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry – all literature in fact – to the droppings of the goats among the rocks – mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.”

— D. H. Lawrence

458. “If you don’t like it, alter it, and if you can’t alter it, put up with it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

459. “The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.”

— D. H. Lawrence

460. “I do esteem individual liberty above everything.”

— D. H. Lawrence

461. “Only in a novel are all things given full play.”

— D. H. Lawrence

462. “I cannot get any sense of an enemy – only of a disaster.”

— D. H. Lawrence

463. “The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.”

— D. H. Lawrence

464. “Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.”

— D. H. Lawrence

465. “In America the chief accusation seems to be one of “Eroticism.” This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty “amours,” or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?”

— D. H. Lawrence

466. “The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Strong Quotes

467. “Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.”

— D. H. Lawrence

468. “Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.”

— D. H. Lawrence

469. “A man will part with anything so long as he’s drunk, and you’re drunk with him.”

— D. H. Lawrence

470. “But his dread was the nights when he could not sleep. Then it was awful indeed, when annihilation pressed in on him on every side. Then it was ghastly, to exist without having any life: lifeless, in the night, to exist.”

— D. H. Lawrence

471. “One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one’s passional changes.”

— D. H. Lawrence

472. “They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.”

— D. H. Lawrence

473. “They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.”

— D. H. Lawrence

474. “It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.”

— D. H. Lawrence

475. “God is only a great imaginative experience.”

— D. H. Lawrence

476. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

477. “That’s it! When you come to know men, that’s how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.”

— D. H. Lawrence

478. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

479. “America exhausts the springs of one’s soul – I suppose that’s what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn’t grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.”

— D. H. Lawrence

480. “A woman needn’t be dragged down by her functions.”

— D. H. Lawrence

481. “My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.”

— D. H. Lawrence

482. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

483. “I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.”

— D. H. Lawrence

484. “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!”

— D. H. Lawrence

485. “The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.”

— D. H. Lawrence

486. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Country Quotes

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

— D. H. Lawrence

488. “It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.”

— D. H. Lawrence

489. “When man has nothing but his will to assert – even his good-will – it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.”

— D. H. Lawrence

490. “At the back of my life’s horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.”

— D. H. Lawrence

491. “Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.”

— D. H. Lawrence

492. “Europe is, perhaps, the least worn-out of the continents, because it is the most lived in. A place that is lived in lives.”

— D. H. Lawrence

493. “It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man’s own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.”

— D. H. Lawrence

494. “They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.”

— D. H. Lawrence

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

495. “An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.”

— D. H. Lawrence

496. “The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.”

— D. H. Lawrence

497. “That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.”

— D. H. Lawrence

498. “As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction.”

— D. H. Lawrence

499. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

500. “He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone.”

— D. H. Lawrence