Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

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

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one's passional changes.

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

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

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.

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.

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

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

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

Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.

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.

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.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

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

God is only a great imaginative experience.

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

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

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

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.

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.

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

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