110+ D. H. Lawrence Quotes On America, Self Pity And Sensual

D.H. Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His most famous works include Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and The Plumed Serpent. He is known for his exploration of psychological and social issues, and his use of symbolism and modernist techniques. Following is our collection on famous quotes by D. H. Lawrence on life, love, america.

Top 10 D. H. Lawrence Quotes

1. Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
2. Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
3. The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
4. Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
5. Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
6. No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.
7. The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
8. One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
9. 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!
10. 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. Lawrence Short Quotes

• An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.
• A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.
• Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.
• The living moment is everything.
• If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.
• The dead don't die. They look on and help.
• How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
• Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
• Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
• The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About Life

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved. — D. H. Lawrence

Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind. — D. H. Lawrence

There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him. — D. H. Lawrence

The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition. — D. H. Lawrence

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken. — D. H. Lawrence

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About Love

In every living thing there is the desire for love. — D. H. Lawrence

Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation. — D. H. Lawrence

Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life. — D. H. Lawrence

A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board — D. H. Lawrence

All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity. — D. H. Lawrence

Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up? — D. H. Lawrence

When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder. — D. H. Lawrence

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About America

In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

[Hawthorne''s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while. — D. H. Lawrence

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. — D. H. Lawrence

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster. — D. H. Lawrence

The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America.... The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. — D. H. Lawrence

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself — D. H. Lawrence

Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface. — D. H. Lawrence

Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About Sensual

We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known. — D. H. Lawrence

Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see--everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity. — D. H. Lawrence

The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice. — D. H. Lawrence

Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. — D. H. Lawrence

She let him come further, his lips came and surging, surging, soft, oh soft, yet on, like the powerful surge of water, irresistible, till with a little blind cry, she broke away. — D. H. Lawrence

Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying.... Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them. — D. H. Lawrence

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them. — D. H. Lawrence

Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig! — D. H. Lawrence

Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got sex into our head. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About Soul

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

And if tonight my soul may find her peacein sleep, and sink in good oblivion,and in the morning wake like a new-opened flowerthen I have been dipped again in God, and new-created. — D. H. Lawrence

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. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens. — D. H. Lawrence

Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. — D. H. Lawrence

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About World

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. Lawrence

And every true artist is the salvation of every other. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in. — D. H. Lawrence

The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. — D. H. Lawrence

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can. — D. H. Lawrence

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. — D. H. Lawrence

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort. — D. H. Lawrence

Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don't get on very well with the world. — D. H. Lawrence

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. — D. H. Lawrence

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality. — D. H. Lawrence

Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Quotes About People

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people. — D. H. Lawrence

I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing. — D. H. Lawrence

The east is not for me--the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes. — D. H. Lawrence

I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint. — D. H. Lawrence

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people. — D. H. Lawrence

The difference between people isn't in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people--life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves. — D. H. Lawrence

When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos. — D. H. Lawrence

People always make war when they say they love peace. — D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. Lawrence

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it's a marvel they can breed. — D. H. Lawrence

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves. — D. H. Lawrence

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness—what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new! — D. H. Lawrence

Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon.... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may. — D. H. Lawrence

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street. — D. H. Lawrence

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. — D. H. Lawrence

Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation. — D. H. Lawrence

Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don't sit down without one of the gods. — D. H. Lawrence

Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor. — D. H. Lawrence

Persephone herself is but a voice or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom, among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom. — D. H. Lawrence

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. — D. H. Lawrence

The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. — D. H. Lawrence

There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond. — D. H. Lawrence

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches Where light pushes through; A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air. A dip to the water. — D. H. Lawrence

The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time. — D. H. Lawrence

When I went to the scientific doctor I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me and reduce me to the level of a thing. So I said: Good-morning! and left him. — D. H. Lawrence

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means. — D. H. Lawrence

When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere. — D. H. Lawrence

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark. — D. H. Lawrence

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life. — D. H. Lawrence

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says. — D. H. Lawrence

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again. — D. H. Lawrence

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life. — D. H. Lawrence

The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action. — D. H. Lawrence

Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! — D. H. Lawrence

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master. — D. H. Lawrence

In masturbation there is nothing but loss. — D. H. Lawrence

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got. — D. H. Lawrence

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral. — D. H. Lawrence

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection. — D. H. Lawrence

The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death. — D. H. Lawrence

Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent. — D. H. Lawrence

Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre. — D. H. Lawrence

Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth. — D. H. Lawrence

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising. — D. H. Lawrence

And to my lips' Bright crimson rim The passion slips, And down my slim White body drips The shining hymn. — D. H. Lawrence

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure. — D. H. Lawrence

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven. — D. H. Lawrence

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. Lawrence

Life Lessons by D. H. Lawrence

1. D.H. Lawrence taught us to embrace our own unique identity and to not be afraid to stand up for ourselves. He also showed us the importance of connecting with our environment and understanding our place in the world.
2. He encouraged us to be open to new experiences, to take risks, and to be willing to explore our own emotions and feelings.
3. Finally, he showed us the power of creativity and the importance of finding our own individual expression through art, literature, and music.