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America
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America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you -- no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Animals
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Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Astrology
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We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Authors & Writing
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books
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Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Bread
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The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and made their own bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loafs seem,so perfumes, as home-made bread used to be before the war.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Censorship
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The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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City Life, Cities
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Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Civilization
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Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Confusion
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Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, Selected Essays
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Conversation
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Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Corruption
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Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Criticism
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Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Democracy
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You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Design
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Education
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They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Effort
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But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Endurance
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Equality
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The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Ethics
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Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books by and about D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence