Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.”

— D. H. Lawrence

353. “Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see – everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

354. “And yet – and yet – one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

355. “If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.”

— D. H. Lawrence

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “The acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear.”

— D. H. Lawrence

360. “The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.”

— D. H. Lawrence

361. “So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “Freedom is a very great reality, but it means above all things, freedom from lies.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

370. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

372. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

375. “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

376. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

380. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

382. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

386. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— 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. “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

397. “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

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. “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

400. “If you believe in your own sex, and won’t have it done dirt to: they’ll down you. It’s the one insane taboo left: sex as a naturaland vital thing.”

— D. H. Lawrence