Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

303. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

305. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

307. “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

308. “To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.”

— D. H. Lawrence

309. “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

310. “I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course. – Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.”

— D. H. Lawrence

311. “It is a fine thing to establish one’s own religion in one’s heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”

— D. H. Lawrence

312. “We are so conceited and so unproud.”

— D. H. Lawrence

313. “What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!”

— D. H. Lawrence

314. “The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters – not to talk in armies and nations and numbers – but to track it home.”

— D. H. Lawrence

315. “I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.”

— D. H. Lawrence

316. “All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

317. “How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.”

— D. H. Lawrence

318. “Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.”

— D. H. Lawrence

319. “So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.”

— D. H. Lawrence

320. “I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.”

— D. H. Lawrence

321. “How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.”

— D. H. Lawrence

322. “Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.”

— D. H. Lawrence

323. “The day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more.”

— D. H. Lawrence

324. “Another head – and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time – to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too.”

— D. H. Lawrence

325. “The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.”

— D. H. Lawrence

326. “The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.”

— D. H. Lawrence

327. “When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be.”

— D. H. Lawrence

328. “Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.”

— D. H. Lawrence

329. “The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.”

— D. H. Lawrence

330. “A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.”

— D. H. Lawrence

331. “Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul.”

— D. H. Lawrence

332. “That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.”

— D. H. Lawrence

333. “Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.”

— D. H. Lawrence

334. “Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?”

— D. H. Lawrence

335. “I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.”

— D. H. Lawrence

336. “It was such peace and heavenly freedom, just to fold her and kiss her gently, and not to have any thoughts or any desires or any will, just to be still with her, to be perfectly still and together, in a peace that was not sleep, but content in bliss. To be content in bliss, without desire or insistence anywhere, this was heaven: to be together in happy stillness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

337. “I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one’s whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.”

— D. H. Lawrence

338. “Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.”

— D. H. Lawrence

339. “Men! The only animal in the world to fear.”

— D. H. Lawrence

340. “I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies – thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.”

— D. H. Lawrence

341. “Europe’s the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.”

— D. H. Lawrence

342. “The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought, Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront Implacable winter’s long, cross-questioning brunt.”

— D. H. Lawrence

343. “I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.”

— D. H. Lawrence

344. “Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.”

— D. H. Lawrence

345. “Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.”

— D. H. Lawrence

346. “In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one’s friends – give me the country.”

— D. H. Lawrence

347. “The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.”

— D. H. Lawrence

348. “The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.”

— D. H. Lawrence

349. “Don’t talk to me any more about poetry for months – unless it is other men’s work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I’m fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.”

— D. H. Lawrence

350. “I’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.”

— D. H. Lawrence