Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

I shall always be a priest of love.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

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.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

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

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

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.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

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

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

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.

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

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.