Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.”

— D. H. Lawrence

352. “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

353. “California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.”

— D. H. Lawrence

354. “What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.”

— D. H. Lawrence

355. “I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me.”

— D. H. Lawrence

356. “The old ideals are dead as nails – nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman – sort of ultimate marriage – and there isn’t anything else.”

— D. H. Lawrence

357. “If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.”

— D. H. Lawrence

358. “Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.”

— D. H. Lawrence

359. “Why doesn’t the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?”

— D. H. Lawrence

360. “How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.”

— D. H. Lawrence

361. “Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.”

— D. H. Lawrence

362. “We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.”

— D. H. Lawrence

363. “I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”

— D. H. Lawrence

364. “A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.”

— D. H. Lawrence

365. “One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.”

— D. H. Lawrence

366. “The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

367. “The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.”

— D. H. Lawrence

368. “If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.”

— D. H. Lawrence

369. “We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ’em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.”

— D. H. Lawrence

370. “You’re spending your life without renewing it. You’ve got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You’re spending your vitality without making any. Can’t go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!”

— D. H. Lawrence

371. “Don’t be on the side of the angels, it’s too lowering.”

— D. H. Lawrence

372. “The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.”

— D. H. Lawrence

373. “Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

374. “The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn’t dictate to her.”

— D. H. Lawrence

375. “Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.”

— D. H. Lawrence

376. “The east is not for me – the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes.”

— D. H. Lawrence

377. “The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.”

— D. H. Lawrence

378. “Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes.”

— D. H. Lawrence

379. “She was half watching, half musing. It was her constant state. Her eyes were keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw.”

— D. H. Lawrence

380. “Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.”

— D. H. Lawrence

381. “Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.”

— D. H. Lawrence

382. “Only youth has a taste of immortality.”

— D. H. Lawrence

383. “She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.”

— D. H. Lawrence

384. “One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.”

— D. H. Lawrence

385. “What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.”

— D. H. Lawrence

386. “All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.”

— D. H. Lawrence

387. “The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.”

— D. H. Lawrence

388. “O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey, still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life’s exclusive city.”

— D. H. Lawrence

389. “Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.”

— D. H. Lawrence

390. “Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them?”

— D. H. Lawrence

391. “The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.”

— D. H. Lawrence

392. “She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men.”

— D. H. Lawrence

393. “I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.”

— D. H. Lawrence

394. “Whatever men you take, keep the idea of man intact: let your soul wait whether your body does or not.”

— D. H. Lawrence

395. “When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.”

— D. H. Lawrence

396. “Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.”

— D. H. Lawrence

397. “The mind is “ashamed” of the blood. And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually. Hence palefaces.”

— D. H. Lawrence

398. “Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.”

— D. H. Lawrence

399. “Whatever a human being makes and makes live, it lives because of the life he puts into it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

400. “Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art – or almost the only stuff.”

— D. H. Lawrence