Quotes by D. H. Lawrence

About D. H. Lawrence:

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works, among other things, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.

D. H. Lawrence

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

D. H. Lawrence

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

D. H. Lawrence

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

D. H. Lawrence

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

D. H. Lawrence

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!

D. H. Lawrence

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

D. H. Lawrence

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

D. H. Lawrence

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

D. H. Lawrence

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.

D. H. Lawrence

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

D. H. Lawrence

God is only a great imaginative experience.

D. H. Lawrence

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

D. H. Lawrence

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

D. H. Lawrence

Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.

D. H. Lawrence

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

D. H. Lawrence

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

D. H. Lawrence

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

D. H. Lawrence

I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.

D. H. Lawrence

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

D. H. Lawrence

Author Bio

  • NameD. H. Lawrence
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter
  • AliasesDavid Herbert Lawrence; Lawrence H. Davison; D.H. Lawrence
  • BornMay 11, 1885
  • DiedMarch 2, 1930
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Translator; Writer; Poet; Novelist; Painter
  • WorksSons And Lovers; The Rainbow; Women In Love; Lady Chatterley's Lover
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize