D. H. Lawrence
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.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Gardening
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Art
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.Collection: Age
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.Collection: Trust
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.Collection: Communication
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Men
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.Collection: Business
People always make war when they say they love peace.Collection: War
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.Collection: Anger
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.Collection: Freedom
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.Collection: Fear
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.Collection: Wisdom
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.Collection: Women
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.Collection: Death
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.Collection: Fear
In every living thing there is the desire for love.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Positive
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.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Religion
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.Collection: Change
It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.Collection: Religion
They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.Collection: Sad
The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.Collection: Beauty
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.Collection: Nature
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Romantic
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.Collection: Freedom
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.
Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.
One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
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.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
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 proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.