David Herbert Lawrence quotes Born: 09/11/1885 Died: 03/02/1930 Country: united_kingdom

• You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in the people. One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies. (David Herbert Lawrence) [democracy/people/class/wisdom]
• Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. (David Herbert Lawrence) [trust/artist/trust/artist]
• They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls. (David Herbert Lawrence) [men/interest]
• Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life. (David Herbert Lawrence) [life]
• The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn. (David Herbert Lawrence) [english]
• Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage. (David Herbert Lawrence) [stroke/men/gold/creation]
• Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth. (David Herbert Lawrence) [more/more]
• The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. (David Herbert Lawrence) [more/democracy/more/light]
• Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup. (David Herbert Lawrence) [willpower/moment/words/oblivion]
• 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. (David Herbert Lawrence) [love/flower/life/right]
• The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent. (David Herbert Lawrence) [equality/equality]
• We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority. (David Herbert Lawrence) [goodwill]
• Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was. (David Herbert Lawrence) [men/men/men/wild]
• Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar. (David Herbert Lawrence) [/change]
• Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless. (David Herbert Lawrence) [life/love/life/love]
• I shall always be a priest of love. (David Herbert Lawrence) [love]
• The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure. (David Herbert Lawrence) [thing/nature/flower/roots]
• God is only a great imaginative experience. (David Herbert Lawrence) [god/experience]
• That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. (David Herbert Lawrence) [magic/power/attention/direction]
• 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. (David Herbert Lawrence) [attempt/human/experience/blood]
• The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man. (David Herbert Lawrence) [horse/horse/power/action]
• The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept. (David Herbert Lawrence) [mind/beliefs/soul & body/consciousness]
• 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) [creation/mankind/death/horror]
• 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) [literature/art]
• I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter. (David Herbert Lawrence) [letter]
• The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection. (David Herbert Lawrence) [thing/perfection]
• 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/embrace/action]
• Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells. (David Herbert Lawrence)
• Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. (David Herbert Lawrence) [more/account/feeling/science]
• 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) [philosophy/happiness/mankind/wife]
• Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither. (David Herbert Lawrence) [absolute/more/direction]

Calendar

Sun Mon Tue Wen Thu Fri Sat Apr 21 [148] Apr 22 [66] 23 [137] 24 [57] 25 [65] 26 [51] 27 [71] 28 Apr 29 [10] 30 [58] 1 [2] 2 [50] 3 [73] 4 [75] 5 [35] May 6 [75] 7 [104] 8 [50] 9 10 [106] 11 [79] 12 [50] May 13 [50] 14 [8] 15 [75] 16 [114] 17 [50] 18 [112] 19 May 20 [79] 21 [76] 22 [59]

The Best Authors

Search

Pop by Searches

Best Quote

Worst Quote