D. H. Lawrence Quotes
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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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What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
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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.
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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.
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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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Another head - and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time - to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too.
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While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.
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Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.
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But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.
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To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.
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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.
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I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
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Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still
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If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.
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For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean?
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America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.
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Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.
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Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.
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Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
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Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.
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Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law.
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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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Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.
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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.