D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

~ D. H. Lawrence

In the ancient recipe the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep drink and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up from drink you become sober and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.

~ D. H. Lawrence

The young Cambridge group the group that stood for freedom and flannel trousers and flannel shirts open at the neck and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy and a whispering murmuring sort of voice and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner.

~ D. H. Lawrence

While we live let us live.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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 or scrub the floor.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

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

~ D. H. Lawrence

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

~ D. H. Lawrence

People always make war when they say they love peace.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

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

~ D. H. Lawrence

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

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

~ D. H. Lawrence

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

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.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.

~ 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

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

~ D. H. Lawrence

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

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

~ D. H. Lawrence

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

~ D. H. Lawrence

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

~ D. H. Lawrence

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

~ D. H. Lawrence

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

~ D. H. Lawrence

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

~ D. H. Lawrence