D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence quote: "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."

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live marr...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And a...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of th...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, t...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so b...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the o...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea o...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I shall always be a priest of love.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men a...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the w...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the int...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I can't do with mountains at close quarters -- they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, n...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are lik...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness an...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himsel...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I don't like your miserable lonely single front name. It is so limited, so meager; it has no versati...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much mor...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks c...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffin...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, a...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations ba...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than an...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

God is only a great imaginative experience.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But i...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me, That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, an...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself;
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I believe a man is born first unto himself --for the happy developing of himself, while the world is...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an abs...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment comp...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my a...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn De...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeolo...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she a...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the crea...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

You were a lord if you had a horse...
Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. . . ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intui...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life,...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty line...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and made their own bread, ah, it is amazing ho...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of s...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morn...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Sleep is still most perfect when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominio...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies -- thinking that those who care about us...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individu...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be ...
D. H. (DAVID HERBERT) LAWRENCE

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
D. H. LAWRENCE

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without e...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
D. H. LAWRENCE

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an ab...
D. H. LAWRENCE

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition...
D H LAWRENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to sa...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
D. H. LAWRENCE

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the w...
D. H. LAWRENCE

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.
D. H. LAWRENCE

In every living thing there is the desire for love.
D. H. LAWRENCE

To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
D. H. LAWRENCE

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, a...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it....
D. H. LAWRENCE

Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffin...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the str...
D. H. LAWRENCE

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
D. H. LAWRENCE

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is a...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with t...
D. H. LAWRENCE

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positi...
D. H. LAWRENCE

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intui...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with se...
D. H. LAWRENCE

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly...
D. H. LAWRENCE

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A moralit...
D. H. LAWRENCE

But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness an...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that. - Selected Essays.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Saying that Windows95 is equal to Macintosh is like finding a potato that looks like Jesus and belie...
D. H. LAWRENCE

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us...
D. H. LAWRENCE

But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness...
D. H. LAWRENCE

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say,...
D H LAWRENCE

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
D. H. LAWRENCE

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intu...
D H LAWRENCE

For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intui...
D H LAWRENCE

Men can such the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures ar...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever ha...
D. H. LAWRENCE

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
D. H. LAWRENCE

For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuit...
D. H. LAWRENCE

One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in...
D. H. LAWRENCE

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitut...
D. H. LAWRENCE

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.
D. H. LAWRENCE

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the crea...
D. H. LAWRENCE

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are lik...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks...
D. H. LAWRENCE

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable o...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, t...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
D. H. LAWRENCE

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a go...
D. H. LAWRENCE

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
D. H. LAWRENCE

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
D. H. LAWRENCE

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void P...
D. H. LAWRENCE

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be maste...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an abs...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
D. H. LAWRENCE

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live marr...
D. H. LAWRENCE

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my ...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
D. H. LAWRENCE

People always make war when they say they love peace.
D. H. LAWRENCE

I shall always be a priest of love.
D. H. LAWRENCE

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
D. H. LAWRENCE

My God, these folks don't know how to love - that's why they love so easily.
D. H. LAWRENCE

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a wo...
D. H. LAWRENCE

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
D. H. LAWRENCE

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel...
D. H. LAWRENCE

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.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

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