D. H. Lawrence was an English novelist and painter. Facing exile in the latter years of his life, Lawrence wrote many novels, short stories, and poetry. Here is a look at some of the most notable D. H. Lawrence quotes to be familiar with.
“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”
“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.”
“Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.”
“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.”
“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.”
“I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories – and how contradictory they are – rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.”
“I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”
“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.”
“In every living thing there is the desire for love.”
“Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Men and women aren’t really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.”
“Men are not free when they’re doing just what they like. Men are only free when they’re doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.”
“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.”
“Money is a sort of instinct. It’s a sort of property of nature in a person to make money.”
“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.”
“Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.”
"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 pic.twitter.com/hNppPrGM8J
— James Grissom (@JGrissomNYC) December 28, 2017
“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
“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 that there is in life, it seems to me.”
“Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.”
“Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. ”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness. And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.”
“The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.”
“The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.”
“The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. ”
“The living moment is everything.”
“The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
“What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. ”
“You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.”
“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!”
Here is a biography to the many lives of D. H. Lawrence.
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