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.
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.
Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.
Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.
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.Collection: Children
It's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money, but if you're born lucky, you will always have more money.Collection: Lucky
We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.Collection: Love
There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.Collection: Sleep
What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.Collection: Eye
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.Collection: Love
Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't.Collection: Poison
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itselfCollection: Sorry
The living moment is everything.Collection: Time
Freedom is a very great reality, but it means above all things, freedom from lies.Collection: Freedom
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.Collection: Inspirational
Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.Collection: Mistake
Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.Collection: Beauty
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.Collection: Real
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.Collection: Soul
Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.Collection: Love Is
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.Collection: Hard Work
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a boardCollection: Love You
And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.Collection: Love
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.Collection: Ocean
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.Collection: Blow
Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.Collection: Mother
And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.Collection: Flower
I've never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself.Collection: Sorry
The Aztec gods and goddesses are, as far as we have known anything about them, an unlovely and unlovable lot. In their myths there is no grace or charm, no poetry. Only this perpetual grudge, grudge, grudging, one god grudging another, the gods grudging men their existence, and men grudging the animals. The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitution, a dirt-eater, a horror, without a touch of tenderness.Collection: Animal
It's hard to ravish a tin of sardines.Collection: Tin
No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.Collection: Being Yourself
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.Collection: Travel
The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.Collection: Sex
I'll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.Collection: Inspirational
Death is ... a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot.Collection: Melting
We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.Collection: Life
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.Collection: Flower
My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!Collection: Dirty
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.Collection: People
For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.Collection: Sympathy
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.Collection: Men
The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.Collection: Artist
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.Collection: Puritan
Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.Collection: Running
Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.Collection: Men