Inspirational Quotes by D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: The Present

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
Topics: Democracy

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!
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Literature, Books

Those who go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness.
—D. H. Lawrence

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Authority, Generations

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Censorship

The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Equality

God is only a great imaginative experience.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Religion, God

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man’s bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Effort

I cannot be a materialist—but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery—such suffering, such dreadful suffering—and shall the short years of Christ’s mission atone for it all?
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Religion, God

I want to live my life so that my nights are full of regrets.
—D. H. Lawrence

I love Italian opera—it’s so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Opera

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Evil

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Speaking, Conversation, Enthusiasm, Passion, Speech

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
Topics: Mankind, Man, Body

The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.
—D. H. Lawrence

Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people’s motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.
—D. H. Lawrence

Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Friendship

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Endurance, Perspective

I don’t like your miserable lonely single “front name.” It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Identity, Names

You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Work, Hard Work

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Kindness

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
—D. H. Lawrence

Love is a thing to be learned. It is a difficult, complex maintenance of individual integrity throughout the incalculable processes of inter-human polarity.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women, Nature

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? 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
Topics: Museums

We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive… and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Dancing

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: City Life, Cities

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies—thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Taste, Thinking, Style

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Conscience, Thought

One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Action

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do—it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Life and Living

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
—D. H. Lawrence

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
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Hedonism, Live-now, Tomorrow, Self-Pity, The Future

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Living, Tragedy

We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Existence

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Respectability, Respect

I am a man, and alive…. For this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Writing

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