Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.”

— D. H. Lawrence

202. “The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

203. “The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.”

— D. H. Lawrence

204. “Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”

— D. H. Lawrence

205. “Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

206. “There’s nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.”

— D. H. Lawrence

207. “The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.”

— D. H. Lawrence

208. “It’s hard to ravish a tin of sardines.”

— D. H. Lawrence

209. “When passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable.”

— D. H. Lawrence

210. “Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul.”

— D. H. Lawrence

211. “Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances.”

— D. H. Lawrence

212. “Why does the thin grey strand Floating up from the forgotten Cigarette between my fingers, Why does it trouble me?”

— D. H. Lawrence

213. “I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.”

— D. H. Lawrence

214. “We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.”

— D. H. Lawrence

215. “There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.”

— D. H. Lawrence

216. “In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.”

— D. H. Lawrence

217. “Don’t be sucked in by the su-superior, don’t swallow the culture bait, don’t drink, don’t drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.”

— D. H. Lawrence

218. “For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery.”

— D. H. Lawrence

219. “In my very own self, I am part of my family.”

— D. H. Lawrence

220. “Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.”

— D. H. Lawrence

221. “The difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people – life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.”

— D. H. Lawrence

222. “Wisdom has reference only to the past. The future remains for ever an infinite field for mistakes.”

— D. H. Lawrence

223. “But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

— D. H. Lawrence

224. “No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me.”

— D. H. Lawrence

225. “When science starts to be interpretive it is more unscientific even than mysticism.”

— D. H. Lawrence

226. “Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.”

— D. H. Lawrence

227. “Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.”

— D. H. Lawrence

228. “The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.”

— D. H. Lawrence

229. “You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.”

— D. H. Lawrence

230. “Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.”

— D. H. Lawrence

231. “No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.”

— D. H. Lawrence

232. “When I went to the scientific doctor I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me and reduce me to the level of a thing. So I said: Good-morning! and left him.”

— D. H. Lawrence

233. “The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.”

— D. H. Lawrence

234. “The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce.”

— D. H. Lawrence

235. “Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.”

— D. H. Lawrence

236. “People always make war when they say they love peace.”

— D. H. Lawrence

237. “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

238. “And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.”

— D. H. Lawrence

239. “If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.”

— D. H. Lawrence

240. “Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.”

— D. H. Lawrence

241. “Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.”

— D. H. Lawrence

242. “Love’s a dog in a manger.”

— D. H. Lawrence

243. “When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”

— D. H. Lawrence

244. “I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.”

— D. H. Lawrence

245. “My shoes are made of Spanish leather, My socks are made of silk; I wear a ring on every finger, I wash myself in milk.”

— D. H. Lawrence

246. “That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.”

— D. H. Lawrence

247. “The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.”

— D. H. Lawrence

248. “If it doesn’t absorb you, if it isn’t any fun, don’t do it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

249. “Nothing is as bad as a marriage that’s a hopeless failure.”

— D. H. Lawrence

250. “Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he’d just laugh.”

— D. H. Lawrence