Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.”

— D. H. Lawrence

152. “Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.”

— D. H. Lawrence

153. “Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.”

— D. H. Lawrence

154. “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

155. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

156. “Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still.”

— D. H. Lawrence

157. “The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

159. “Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.”

— D. H. Lawrence

160. “Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth... !”

— D. H. Lawrence

161. “For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.”

— D. H. Lawrence

162. “Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.”

— D. H. Lawrence

163. “The love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.”

— D. H. Lawrence

164. “To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

165. “Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.”

— D. H. Lawrence

166. “To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.”

— D. H. Lawrence

167. “It’s bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.”

— D. H. Lawrence

168. “Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.”

— D. H. Lawrence

169. “The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea.”

— D. H. Lawrence

170. “Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.”

— D. H. Lawrence

171. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”

— D. H. Lawrence

172. “How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed...”

— D. H. Lawrence

173. “I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.”

— D. H. Lawrence

174. “I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze.”

— D. H. Lawrence

175. “Man is a thought-adventurer.”

— D. H. Lawrence

176. “The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination.”

— D. H. Lawrence

177. “Hate’s a growing thing like anything else. It’s the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one’s deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.”

— D. H. Lawrence

178. “But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff’s edge, like Sappho into the sea.”

— D. H. Lawrence

179. “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.”

— D. H. Lawrence

180. “Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.”

— D. H. Lawrence

181. “I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct – and societal repression much more devastating.”

— D. H. Lawrence

182. “Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.”

— D. H. Lawrence

183. “Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.”

— D. H. Lawrence

184. “Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.”

— D. H. Lawrence

185. “The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.”

— D. H. Lawrence

186. “Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

187. “A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one’s religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”

— D. H. Lawrence

188. “Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interested him more.”

— D. H. Lawrence

189. “In his dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.”

— D. H. Lawrence

190. “When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.”

— D. H. Lawrence

191. “Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.”

— D. H. Lawrence

192. “Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.”

— D. H. Lawrence

193. “Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.”

— D. H. Lawrence

194. “They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.”

— D. H. Lawrence

195. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

197. “He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.”

— D. H. Lawrence

198. “The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

200. “Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.”

— D. H. Lawrence