Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I can’t do with mountains at close quarters – they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.”

— D. H. Lawrence

452. “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

453. “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

454. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

456. “One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— 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 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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

461. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

473. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

475. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

477. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

479. “God doesn’t know things. He is things.”

— D. H. Lawrence

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

488. “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

489. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

491. “No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer.”

— D. H. Lawrence

492. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

497. “It is our business to go as we are impelled.”

— D. H. Lawrence

498. “The picture must all come out of the artist’s inside. It is the image that lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.”

— D. H. Lawrence

499. “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

500. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence