D. H. Lawrence Quotes
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The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.
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The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.
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Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.
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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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I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course. Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.
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The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.
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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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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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Nobody knows you. You don't know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?
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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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Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
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Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.
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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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It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.
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When man has nothing but his will to assert--even his good-will--it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.
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They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
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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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Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.
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The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.
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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.
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And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn't quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn't ever love at all.
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To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.
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I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
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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.