Quotes from D. H. Lawrence

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.

One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.

Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.

And unless one decorates one's house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are all wall-eyed.

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.

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

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.

It's bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.

Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the strayingof the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.

Nothing is as bad as a marriage that's a hopeless failure.

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.

Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.

Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.

Men! The only animal in the world to fear.

So we need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with. But not in the rather silly modern way of horoscopy and telling your fortune by the stars... They want their "fortune" told, never this misfortune.

I will wait and watch till the day of David at last shall be finished, and wisdom no more fox-faced, and the blood gets back its flame.

If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.