Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence

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

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

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.

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

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

God doesn't know things. He is things.

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

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

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.

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 world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

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

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.