966 Quotes by D. H. Lawrence

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.

So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.

The day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more.

Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another.

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make ’em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.

The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce.

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.

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