D. H. Lawrence Quotes
D. H. Lawrence Quotations
Author, poet, playwright and essayist are all words that describe D. H. Lawrence, who was also a well known literary critic. Is it any wonder that someone of his pedigree would have so much say and share?
These are some of our favorite D. H. Lawrence quotes that reflect on the various aspects of the human condition including emotions, creativity, health, sexuality and behavior. If you have D. H. Lawrence quotations you'd like to see published in this site please send us a note.
"I believe a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers."
"An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality--same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under."
"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."
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books--repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."
"I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd."
"The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death."
"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."
"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."
"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."
"The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just."
"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."
"We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do--it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much."
"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 human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens."
"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
"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."