D. H. Lawrence Quotes
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Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.
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Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
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Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.
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Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
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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.
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Europe is, perhaps, the least worn-out of the continents, because it is the most lived in. A place that is lived in lives.
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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.
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Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.
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Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.
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Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.
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And to my lips' Bright crimson rim The passion slips, And down my slim White body drips The shining hymn.
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How the horse dominated the mind of the early races especially of the Mediterranean! 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!
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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.
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Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.
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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.
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The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.
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The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.
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The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language.
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The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
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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.
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the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.
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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.
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Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.
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Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.