Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.”

— D. H. Lawrence

152. “Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.”

— D. H. Lawrence

153. “I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.”

— D. H. Lawrence

154. “The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.”

— D. H. Lawrence

155. “The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

158. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

160. “A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon’s mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

168. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

176. “The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.”

— D. H. Lawrence

177. “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

178. “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

179. “I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

181. “If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.”

— D. H. Lawrence

182. “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

183. “Man is a thought-adventurer.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

185. “One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.”

— D. H. Lawrence

186. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

188. “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

189. “She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men.”

— D. H. Lawrence

190. “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

191. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

193. “Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “You must always be a-waggle with LOVE.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence