Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

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

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

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.

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

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

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

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

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

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

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

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.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

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

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

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