Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Love’s a dog in a manger.”

— D. H. Lawrence

253. “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

254. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

256. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

258. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

269. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

271. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

279. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

282. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

296. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

298. “I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.”

— D. H. Lawrence

299. “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

300. “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