Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes 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

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Civilization, Corruption

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

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

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Men

But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Peace

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

After all, the world is not a stage—not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches… and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That’s what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that’s what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it—if he wants a safe seat in the audience—let him read someone else.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Books, Reading

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Individuality

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Love

The great home of the soul is the open road.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Courage

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
—D. H. Lawrence

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me, That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea… There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute, except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Serenity

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Ethics

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

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Nationalism, Nations, Nationality, Nation

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

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

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

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

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.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Religion

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

The living moment is everything.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Live-now, Past and Present

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: Books, Literature

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Society

What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Instincts

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Pornography

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art—or almost the only stuff.
—D. H. Lawrence
Topics: Profanity, Vulgarity, Swearing

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

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