Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “You must always be a-waggle with LOVE.”

— D. H. Lawrence

252. “Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.”

— D. H. Lawrence

253. “We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.”

— D. H. Lawrence

254. “This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.”

— D. H. Lawrence

255. “Homer was wrong in saying, “Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.”

— D. H. Lawrence

256. “The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.”

— D. H. Lawrence

257. “Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another.”

— D. H. Lawrence

258. “Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.”

— D. H. Lawrence

259. “And whoever forces himself to love anybody begets a murderer in his own body.”

— D. H. Lawrence

260. “When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.”

— D. H. Lawrence

261. “If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.”

— D. H. Lawrence

262. “No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.”

— D. H. Lawrence

263. “Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It’s when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life’s not worth having.”

— D. H. Lawrence

264. “We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.”

— D. H. Lawrence

265. “For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean?”

— D. H. Lawrence

266. “I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me – and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.”

— D. H. Lawrence

267. “Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.”

— D. H. Lawrence

268. “And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.”

— D. H. Lawrence

269. “The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.”

— D. H. Lawrence

270. “The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.”

— D. H. Lawrence

271. “The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.”

— D. H. Lawrence

272. “And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.”

— D. H. Lawrence

273. “For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.”

— D. H. Lawrence

274. “The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.”

— D. H. Lawrence

275. “We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.”

— D. H. Lawrence

276. “The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.”

— D. H. Lawrence

277. “Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower.”

— D. H. Lawrence

278. “He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. ‘Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct’ was his motto.”

— D. H. Lawrence

279. “The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.”

— D. H. Lawrence

280. “What’s that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!”

— D. H. Lawrence

281. “Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.”

— D. H. Lawrence

282. “I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don’t know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.”

— D. H. Lawrence

283. “Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”

— D. H. Lawrence

284. “I believe the nearest I’ve come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.”

— D. H. Lawrence

285. “And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn’t quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn’t ever love at all.”

— D. H. Lawrence

286. “Isn’t it god’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?”

— D. H. Lawrence

287. “Shame, what was it? It was part of extreme delight. It was that part of delight of which man is usually afraid. Why afraid? The secret, shameful things are most terribly beautiful.”

— D. H. Lawrence

288. “There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond.”

— D. H. Lawrence

289. “Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep; And disgustingly upside down. Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags And grinning in their sleep. Bats!”

— D. H. Lawrence

290. “The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.”

— D. H. Lawrence

291. “I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual – we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I’m sure that is entirely wrong.”

— D. H. Lawrence

292. “The great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living termsonce had a vast and perhaps perfect science of itsown, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.”

— D. H. Lawrence

293. “All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.”

— D. H. Lawrence

294. “And what’s romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time.”

— D. H. Lawrence

295. “You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

296. “One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.”

— D. H. Lawrence

297. “You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.”

— D. H. Lawrence

298. “You don’t want to love – your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.”

— D. H. Lawrence

299. “Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

300. “The tragedy is when you’ve got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.”

— D. H. Lawrence