Quotes from David Herbert Lawrence

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

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.

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

Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.

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

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

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.

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

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

People always make war when they say they love peace.

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

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.