D. H. Lawrence
The love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.Collection: Love
Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.Collection: Beauty
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.Collection: Sex
No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.Collection: Love Is
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.Collection: Spring
The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.Collection: Fear
This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.Collection: Believe
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.Collection: Love
Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.Collection: People
Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?Collection: Inspiring
It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.Collection: Loneliness
The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.Collection: Change
The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.Collection: God
It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman - who is much of a woman - is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation - none of them - not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.Collection: Love
How the horse dominated the mind of the early races especially of the Mediterranean! You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances...The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action in man!Collection: Horse
That's just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what's good for a man, and she's going to see he gets it; and no matter if he's starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she's got him, and is giving him what's good for him.Collection: Women
Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.Collection: Inspirational
He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto.Collection: Animal
The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.Collection: Country
Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.Collection: Marriage
The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.Collection: Horse
Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.Collection: Dream
Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.Collection: Reality
I love Italian opera - it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.Collection: Love
He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.Collection: Education
Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God. Now life interested him more.Collection: Should Have
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.Collection: Trying
Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.Collection: Life
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods.Collection: Jesus
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.Collection: Literature
Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.Collection: Leadership
The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.Collection: Poetry
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.Collection: Time
The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the winds, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret.Collection: Attitude
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.Collection: Men
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.Collection: Death
Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.Collection: Long
Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.Collection: Children
You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.Collection: Ordinary World
He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.Collection: Moon
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed.Collection: Sarcastic
The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.Collection: Pain
I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Art
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?Collection: Liberty
For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to a star, or you will just stay where you are.Collection: Stars
America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.Collection: Spring
I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.Collection: Mistake
Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.Collection: God