Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

465. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

469. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

471. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

478. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

480. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

497. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

500. “I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.”

— D. H. Lawrence