Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

254. “Love’s a dog in a manger.”

— D. H. Lawrence

255. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

259. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

261. “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

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. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

269. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

272. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

274. “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

275. “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

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. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

283. “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

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

— 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. “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

288. “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

289. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

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

— 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. “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

296. “I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.”

— D. H. Lawrence

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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