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

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

D. H. Lawrence (1885–30) was an English author of provocative novels that attracted controversy for their sexual content. He was also a successful poet, playwright, and short-story writer.

Lawrence is best known for inciting strong reactions in his readers for his radical narrative of familial and marital lives and his brazen celebration of sexual relations. For these reasons, he waged a constant battle with the censors.

Lawrence’s most famous novels are Sons and Lovers (1913,) The Rainbow (1915,) Women in Love (1920,) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928.) The latter is the most influential and notorious of Lawrence’s novels. It features a young aristocrat whose husband is paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. He encourages her to find a lover but disapproves of her choice of his gamekeeper.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication for more than 30 years because of its obscene themes and language. In 1960, a famous court case cleared the book of obscenity after 35 prominent writers and literary critics testified in its favor. When Penguin Books published 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the book sold out within a day, and most bookstores that carried the book ran out of copies within 15 minutes.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by D. H. Lawrence

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: America

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Freedom

The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Courage

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: War

My God, these folks don’t know how to love—that’s why they love so easily.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love, Lovers

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Self-Discovery

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
—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: Nature, Women, Men & Women, Men

We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
—D. H. Lawrence

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Books, Literature

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.

And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love

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

And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Sleep

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes water and nobody knows what that is.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Water

I shall always be a priest of love.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men & Women, Women, Men

I believe a man is born first unto himself—for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Maturity

If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.
—D. H. Lawrence

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Thinking

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Flowers

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Home, Freedom

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Letters

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Nature, Mountains

Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Travel, Tourism

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

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Humanity, Humankind

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Intelligence

Take nothing, to say: I have it! For you can possess nothing, not even peace.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Peace

Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Gossip

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