Top 500 D. H. Lawrence Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

404. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

408. “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

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

— 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. “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

414. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

439. “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

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

— D. H. Lawrence

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.”

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

— D. H. Lawrence

449. “The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.”

— D. H. Lawrence

450. “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