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David Herbert Lawrence

51 quotes

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) was an English novelist, poet, and essayist whose work explored the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. His novels — including *Sons and Lovers*, *Women in Love*, and *Lady Chatterley's Lover* — pushed boundaries in their frank treatment of sexuality and emotional life.

“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.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

History

All Quotes by David Herbert Lawrence

“The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Death

“You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Love

“So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Business

“Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Change

“People always make war when they say they love peace.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Peace

“Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Death

“Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Freedom

“It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Humor

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Religion

“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.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Nature

“Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Knowledge

“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.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Experience

“The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Art

“Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Freedom

“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!”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Art

“Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Peace

“God is only a great imaginative experience.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Experience

“They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Sad

“My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Happiness

“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.”

— David Herbert Lawrence

Death