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Relationships
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I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Religion
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Respect
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I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Romance
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And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it's always daisy-time.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Self-Pity
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I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself;
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Serenity
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I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me, That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea... There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute, except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Sex
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Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Sleep
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Sleep is still most perfect when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
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And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Society
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Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Style
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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.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Thought
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The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Tragedy
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Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Travel
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Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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War
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The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Women
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The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation -- none of them -- not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Work
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You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
-D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
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Books by and about D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence