D. H. Lawrence Life Quotations

The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.

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.

The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.

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.

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.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do - it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.

Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.

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.

The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.

We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.

For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

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.

It is as if the life had retreated eastwards. As if the Germanic life were slowly ebbing away from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east.

It is not a pleasant epoch in one's life - the first forty eight hours at a large public school

Only now it had become indispensable to him to have her face pressed close to him; he could never let her go again. He could never let her head go away from the close clutch of his arm. He wanted to remain like that for ever, with his heart hurting him in a pain that was also life to him.

I don't like your miserable lonely single ''front name.'' It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.

Unless we submit our will to the flooding of life, there is no life in us.

For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

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.

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

Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being.

Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still

There is no such thing as sin. There is only life and anti-life.