Quotes from D. H. Lawrence

California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.

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.

Europe's the mayonnaise, but America supplies the good old lobster.

The love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.

I am in love and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man.

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality--same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.

That's it! When you come to know men, that's how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.

Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species

One man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.

The old ideals are dead as nails--nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman--sort of ultimate marriage--and there isn't anything else.

Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.

Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.

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.

A house o' women is as dead as a house wi' no fire, to my thinkin'. I'm not a spider as likes to corner myself. I like a man about, if he's only something to snap at.

But I like the feel of men on things, while they're alive. There's a feel of men about trucks, because they've been handled with men's hands, all of them.

Homer was wrong in saying, "Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!" He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.

Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he'd just laugh.

How can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won't sell at any price?

A man will part with anything so long as he's drunk, and you're drunk with him.

Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.