David Herbert Lawrence

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!

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

God doesn't know things. He is things.

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

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 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.

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.

I shall always be a priest of love.

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

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

People always make war when they say they love peace.

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.

You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive you're negative. You absorb absorb as if you must fill yourself up with love because you've got a shortage somewhere.

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

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

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander to do.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul and he has got dozens.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

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

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it shaping it, and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

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.

It is quite true as some poets said that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor creating him a reasonable being yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere and when we get there it is nowhere for there is nowhere to get to.

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul angry or gentle. Anger is just and pity is just but judgement is never just.

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.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate and the real wolf at the end of the street.

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

Be a good animal true to your animal instincts.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way and they are so stupid never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.