Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

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

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

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.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

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.

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

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.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

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

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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