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Love
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My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Mankind, Man
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Marriage
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Maturity
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Men
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How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Men & Women
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The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Moon
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The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Morals
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There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Museums, Galleries
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Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Myths, Mythology
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Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Nature
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I can't do with mountains at close quarters -- they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Opera
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I love Italian opera -- it's so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don't care about their immortal souls, and don't worry about the ultimate.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Peace
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But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence
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People
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One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Pornography
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Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Prostitution
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If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Psychology
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We have lost the art of living; and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Reading
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After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books by and about D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence