Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

I shall always be a priest of love.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

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

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

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.

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

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.