Quotes from D. H. Lawrence

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

Men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet. Can a man tread the unstable water all his life, and call that standing? Better give in and drown at once.

For God's sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I'll do my best. But you're right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer.

I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.

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.

Having achieved and accomplished love, then the man passes into the unknown. He has become himself, his tale is told.

Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.

Now man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

The tragedy is, when you've got sex in your head, instead of down where it belongs, and when you have to go on copulating with your ears and your nose.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

Men and women aren't really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. Somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent.

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.

A woman needn't be dragged down by her functions.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.