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Evil
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This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Exile
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We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Flowers
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The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Freedom
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Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Generations
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We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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God
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God is only a great imaginative experience.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I cannot be a materialist -- but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery -- such suffering, such dreadful suffering -- and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Gossip
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Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Horses, Horse Racing
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You were a lord if you had a horse...
Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. . . . The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, 1931
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Humanity
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Identity
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I don't like your miserable lonely single front name. It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Individuality
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Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Insects
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That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Intelligence
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My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Intuition
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The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Kindness
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It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Letters (writing)
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I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Life
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Logic
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Love
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Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.
And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, A Love Song
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great --quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I shall always be a priest of love.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books by and about D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence