D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence Quotes

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me, That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea... There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute, except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

And if tonight my soul may find her peacein sleep, and sink in good oblivion,and in the morning wake like a new-opened flowerthen I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

I never saw a wild thingsorry for itself;A small bird will drop frozen dead from a boughwithout ever having felt sorry for itself.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.

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 belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

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 level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.

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, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.

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

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

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.

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 interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

I shall always be a priest of love.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence