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.
I shall always be a priest of love.
If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
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.
The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.
All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
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!
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
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.
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.
My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
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.
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
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.
The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
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.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.
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.
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.
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.
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.
God doesn't know things. He is things.