D.H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence was one of the most important English writers of the 20th century.
Found 82 thoughts of D.H. Lawrence
Never have ideas about children -- and never have ideas for them.
D.H. Lawrence
Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.
D.H. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
D.H. Lawrence
The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.
D.H. Lawrence
In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No, the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.
D.H. Lawrence
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
D.H. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgment is never just.
D.H. Lawrence
We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
D.H. Lawrence
If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishable.
D.H. Lawrence
We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.
D.H. Lawrence
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
No man is or can be purely individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so, and will always be so.
D.H. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
D.H. Lawrence
The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
D.H. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be mere rushing on.
D.H. Lawrence
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
D.H. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
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. Lawrence
