D. H. Lawrence Quotes
David Herbert Lawrence was born on the 11th of September, 1885 in Eastwood, United Kingdom. D. H. Lawrence was an English author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. He is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
He published many novels and poetry volumes. This includes: Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920). D. H. Lawrence is best known for his infamous novel ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’ which was banned in the United States until 1959. He died March 2, 1930 in Vence, France.
In this article, you will find a collection of famous D. H. Lawrence quotes and sayings.
80 D. H. Lawrence Quotes About Life & Love
“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 Quotes
“It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of ha*rlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“My God, these folks don’t know how to love — that’s why they love so easily.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“If you could only tell them that living and spending isn’t the same thing! But it’s no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily…”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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 Quotes
“The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart’s privacy, he excused himself, saying, “If she hadn’t said so-and-so, it would never have happened.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“You’re spending your life without renewing it. You’ve got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You’re spending your vitality without making any. Can’t go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“S3x and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. ” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Recklessness is almost a man’s revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself. ” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn’t quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn’t ever love at all.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to?
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“You’re always begging things to love you,” he said, “as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them–” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. All his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel which united them. She did not want to meet him so that there were two of them man and woman together. She wanted to draw all of him into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness which fascinated him as drug-taking might. He was discussing Michael Angelo. It felt to her as if she were fing*ering the very quivering tissue the very protoplasm of life as she heard him. It gave her deepest satisfaction. And in the end it frightened her. There he lay in the white intensity of his search and his voice gradually filled her with fear so level it was almost inhuman as if in a trance.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“She had borne so long this cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams. ” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual – we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I’m sure that is entirely wrong.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“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 Quotes
20 Short D. H. Lawrence Quotes & Sayings
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake. ” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Be a good animal,true to your instincts.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free from their authority.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“Life is a traveling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“It’s terrible, once you’ve got a man into your blood!” she said.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“The human soul needs beauty more than bread.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“We fu*cked a flame into being.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.”―D. H. Lawrence Quotes
“We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.” ―D. H. Lawrence Quotes