Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

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

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

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.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

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

Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

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.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

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

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.