Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.”

— D. H. Lawrence

402. “A book lives as long as it is unfathomed.”

— D. H. Lawrence

403. “He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.”

— D. H. Lawrence

404. “The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all.”

— D. H. Lawrence

405. “He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.”

— D. H. Lawrence

406. “The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.”

— D. H. Lawrence

407. “When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

409. “You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister.”

— D. H. Lawrence

410. “The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.”

— D. H. Lawrence

411. “Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.”

— D. H. Lawrence

412. “The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”

— D. H. Lawrence

413. “The elephant, the huge old beast, is slow to mate.”

— D. H. Lawrence

414. “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

415. “Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.”

— D. H. Lawrence

416. “Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.”

— D. H. Lawrence

417. “Unless one decorates one’s house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.”

— D. H. Lawrence

418. “The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.”

— D. H. Lawrence

419. “That’s just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what’s good for a man, and she’s going to see he gets it; and no matter if he’s starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she’s got him, and is giving him what’s good for him.”

— D. H. Lawrence

420. “Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”

— D. H. Lawrence

421. “A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.”

— D. H. Lawrence

422. “Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.”

— D. H. Lawrence

423. “It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.”

— D. H. Lawrence

424. “America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you – no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.”

— D. H. Lawrence

425. “So slowly the hot elephant hearts grow full of desire, and the great beasts mate in secret at last, hiding their fire.”

— D. H. Lawrence

426. “Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law.”

— D. H. Lawrence

427. “What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.”

— D. H. Lawrence

428. “I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don’t know where it comes from.”

— D. H. Lawrence

429. “One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

430. “But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.”

— D. H. Lawrence

431. “Voltaire, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Rousseau... established a new connection between mankind and the universe, and the result was a vast release of energy. The sun was reborn to man and so was the moon. To man, the very sun goes stale, becomes a habit. Comes a saviour, a seer, and the very sun dances new in heaven.”

— D. H. Lawrence

432. “In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.”

— D. H. Lawrence

433. “I’ll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.”

— D. H. Lawrence

434. “Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.”

— D. H. Lawrence

435. “The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.”

— D. H. Lawrence

436. “Money is the seal and stamp of success.”

— D. H. Lawrence

437. “One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.”

— D. H. Lawrence

438. “I wonder which was more frightened among old tribes – those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests.”

— D. H. Lawrence

439. “They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.”

— D. H. Lawrence

440. “An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.”

— D. H. Lawrence

441. “Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.”

— D. H. Lawrence

442. “Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.”

— D. H. Lawrence

443. “Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.”

— D. H. Lawrence

444. “I do esteem individual liberty above everything.”

— D. H. Lawrence

445. “An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality – same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.”

— D. H. Lawrence

446. “My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry – all literature in fact – to the droppings of the goats among the rocks – mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.”

— D. H. Lawrence

447. “How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted.”

— D. H. Lawrence

448. “She let him come further, his lips came and surging, surging, soft, oh soft, yet on, like the powerful surge of water, irresistible, till with a little blind cry, she broke away.”

— D. H. Lawrence

449. “There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.”

— D. H. Lawrence

450. “One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.”

— D. H. Lawrence