D. H. Lawrence (quotes)

Love’s a dog in a manger.
While we live, let us live.
Man is a thought-adventurer.
Where sanity is there God is.
The living moment is everything.
We are so conceited and so unproud.
Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.
I shall always be a priest of love.
The goal is to know how not-to-know.
You must always be a-waggle with LOVE.
It’s hard to ravish a tin of sardines.
Only youth has a taste of immortality.
God doesn’t know things. He is things.
Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
Money is the seal and stamp of success.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself
A book lives as long as it is unfathomed.
Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.
Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.
The dead don’t die. They look on and help.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
In masturbation there is nothing but loss.
there is no pornography without a secrecy.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
The great home of the soul is the open road.
In my very own self, I am part of my family.
It is our business to go as we are impelled.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul.
When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.
Why is a door-knob deader than anything else?
I want the wonder back again, or I shall die.
The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense.
Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
The map appears to us more real than the land.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love.
I do esteem individual liberty above everything.
Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.
A woman needn’t be dragged down by her functions.
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.
Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.
It’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for my sake.
She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.
In every living thing there is the desire for love.
If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.
I’ve never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself.
The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.
No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer.
One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.
What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.
I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
People always make war when they say they love peace.
Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances.
Don’t be on the side of the angels, it’s too lowering.
An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.
To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.
We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.
I cannot get any sense of an enemy – only of a disaster.
Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.
There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.
You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.
Nothing is as bad as a marriage that’s a hopeless failure.
Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
When love turns into dust, money becomes the substitution.
Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.
As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction
You’ve got to know yourself so you can at last be yourself.
A man must keep his earnestness nimble, to escape ridicule.
If it doesn’t absorb you, if it isn’t any fun, don’t do it.
How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
Happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people.
What’s that as flies without wings, your ladyship? Time! Time!
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality.
The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.
It’s autumn and everybody feels like a disembodied spirit then.
Logic might be unanswerable because it was so absolutely wrong.
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.
Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven.
Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
[Hawthorne”s] pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while.
It’s terrible, once you’ve got a man into your blood!” she said.
The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.
What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.
The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy.
The only reality was nothingness, and over it a hypocrisy of words.
A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.
What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.
The #‚Äé cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts.
I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.
Pure morality is only an instinctive adjustment which the soul makes.
I’ll do my life work, sticking up for the love between man and woman.
Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.
Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it.
That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.
He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.
Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.
Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.
Anatomy presupposes a corpse; psychology presupposes a world of corpses.
They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.
The acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.
It’s bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.
One never can know the whys and the wherefores of one’s passional changes.
If you don’t like it, alter it, and if you can’t alter it, put up with it.
At the back of my life’s horizon, where the dreamings of past lives crowd.
The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.
Sex is the root of which intuition is the foliage and beauty is the flower.
If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night
I am in love and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man.
My God, these folks don’t know how to love – that’s why they love so easily.
The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.
You can have your cake and eat it. But my God, it will go rotten inside you.
The day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more.
Europe’s the mayonnaise all right, but America supplies the good old lobster.
We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.
The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.
The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination.
Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.
A man will part with anything so long as he’s drunk, and you’re drunk with him.
The tragedy is when you’ve got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.
Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.
Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.
Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.
She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.
Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got.
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
Freedom is a very great reality, but it means above all things, freedom from lies.
If a woman hasn’t got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she’s a dry stick as a rule.
A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everyone.
I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don’t.
Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.
The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.
She had borne so long the cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.
The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell emerges strange and lovely.
When science starts to be interpretive, it is more unscientific even than mysticism.
The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.
Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
One’s action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.
The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action.
The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.
Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man.
The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.
Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.
In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.
The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself.
Can you understand how cruelly I feel the lack of friends who will believe in me a bit?
Only the flow matters; live and let live, love and let love. There is no point in love.
Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha
Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.
Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.
Do come back and draw the ferrets, they are the most lovely noble darlings in the world.
You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there smothered.
I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.
Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.
The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn’t dictate to her.
There is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board
Whatever a human being makes and makes live, it lives because of the life he puts into it.
Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.
One could laugh at the world better if it didn’t mix tender kindliness with its brutality.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.
I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.
It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.
Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.
That’s it! When you come to know men, that’s how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place.
The only principle I can see in this life, is that one must forfeit the less for the greater.
Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.
The glamour of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance.
One should be religious in everything, have God, whatever God might be, present in everything.
The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.
Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.
I think I am much too valuable a creature to offer myself to a German bullet gratis and for fun.
I believe the nearest I’ve come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about 16.
A snake came to my water trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat, To drink there.
The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.
The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.
You don’t learn algebra with your blessed soul. Can’t you look at it with your clear simple wits?
Shall I tell you what you have that other men don’t?…. It’s the courage of your own tenderness.
For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery
Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.
It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.
Why doesn’t the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
Whether I get on in the world is a question; but I certainly don’t get on very well with the world.
How can any man be free without a soul of his own, that he believes in and won’t sell at any price?
The mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.
There’s always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.
Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.
Whatever men you take, keep the idea of man intact: let your soul wait whether your body does or not.
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
I am turned into a dream. I feel nothing, or I don’t know what I feel. Yet it seems to me I am happy.
That’s how women are with me ” said Paul. “They want me like mad but they don’t want to belong to me.
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
The mind is “ashamed” of the blood. And the blood is destroyed by the mind, actually. Hence palefaces.
Unless one decorates one’s house for oneself alone, best leave it bare, for other people are walleyed.
Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it! For you will need it. For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.
Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness. And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.
Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.
We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.
Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.
Eat and carouse with Bacchus, or munch dry bread with Jesus, but don’t sit down without one of the gods.
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.
For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.
And to my lips’ Bright crimson rim The passion slips, And down my slim White body drips The shining hymn.
If a woman’s got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it’s thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!
Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.
The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut off your god at the waist.
Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.
I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct ‚Äî and societal repression much more devastating.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.
Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art — or almost the only stuff.
When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.
The deadly Hydra now is the hydra of Equality. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity is the three-fanged serpent.
I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.
The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
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.
[U]nless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force.
Brave people add up to an aristocracy. The democracy of thou-shalt-not is bound to be a collection of weak men.
But then peace, peace! I am so mistrustful of it: so much afraid that it means a sort of weakness and giving in.
Imitate the magnificent trees that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.
One should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God.
Let there be an end … of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.
A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.. I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.
What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!
Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.
Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.
You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.
So long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t matter, happiness or unhappiness.
To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.
Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience.
That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.
Having achieved and accomplished love, then the man passes into the unknown. He has become himself, his tale is told.
I’d wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.
Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.
If it be not true to me, What care I how true it be.. Though it be not true to thee, It’s gay and gospel truth to me.
Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
If only we could live two lives: the first in which to make one’s mistakes, and the second in which to profit by them.
Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still
Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.
When passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable.
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.
Censors are dead men set up to judge between life and death. For no live, sunny man would be a censor, he’d just laugh.
It grew late. Through the open door, stealthily, came the scent of madonna lilies, almost as if it were prowling abroad.
The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
The unhappiness of a wife with a good husband is much more devastating than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.
The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.
The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.
Europe is, perhaps, the least worn-out of the continents, because it is the most lived in. A place that is lived in lives.
Nobody knows you. You don’t know yourself. And I, who am half in love with you, What am I in love with? My own imaginings?
Sacred love is selfless, seeking not its own. The lover serves his beloved and seeks perfect communion of oneness with her.
I’d be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.
If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink at last, as human psychology.
Another head – and a black alpaca jacket and a serviette this time – to tell us coffee is ready. Not before it is time, too.
You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the “ordinary world.
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 am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.
Where the electron behaves and misbehaves as it will, where the forces tie themselves up into knots of atoms and come united.
Any novel of importance has a purpose. If only the “purpose” be large enough, and not at outs with the passional inspiration.
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?
Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement ‚Äî meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.
Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.
Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.
Be careful, then, and be gentle about death. For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through the door, even when it opens.
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.
And every true artist is the salvation of every other. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in.
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.
The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.
And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.
If we lose our sanity … We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.
I love you, rotten, Delicious rottenness. …wonderful are the hellish experiences, Orphic, delicate Dionysos of the Underworld.
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.
One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it… and the journey is always towards the other soul.
I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don’t know where it comes from.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
I hate England and its hopelessness. I hate [Arnold] Bennett’s resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great big kick at misery.
When love enters, the whole spiritual constitution of a man changes, is filled with the Holy Ghost, and almost his form is altered.
The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for it. Yet we don’t want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.
In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.
You’re always begging things to love you,” he said, “as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them–
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
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.
When each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made…. There is only this strange recognition of present otherness.
One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.
For God’s sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don’t say surgaries, or I’m done.
The true artist doesn’t substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.
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.
I believe that the highest virtue is to be happy, living in the greatest truth, not submitting to the falsehood of these personaltimes.
I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.
He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.
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 live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.
One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.
No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.
The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.
Whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.
The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it: though I‚Äôll do my best. But you‚Äôre right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.
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!
It’s better to be born lucky than rich. If you’re rich, you may lose your money, but if you’re born lucky, you will always have more money.
I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.
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.
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.
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.
Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion?…. It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions.
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego … things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.
Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.
The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification ofthe spirit.
The final aim is not to know, but to be…. You’ve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. “Be yourself” is the last motto.
And this is the final meaning of work: the extension of human consciousness. The lesser meaning of work is the achieving of self-preservation.
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent.
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.
She knew that the horse, born to serve nobly, had waited in vain for someone noble to serve. His spirit knew that nobility had gone out of men.
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.
One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.
What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.
How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed.
Yea, Paris is a festive ton — a festive Ton for all! Skate o’er on joy — Thin crust of gilded, polished joy! What matters it if Hell’s beneath?
There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of -vast ranges of experience, like humming of unseen harps, we know nothing of, within us.
I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth’s follies – thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
If you believe in your own sex, and won’t have it done dirt to: they’ll down you. It’s the one insane taboo left: sex as a naturaland vital thing.
The nice clean intimacy which we now so admire between the sexes is sterilizing. It makes neuters. Later on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible.
The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.
I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It’s amazing how it cheers one up to shred orange and scrub the floor.
The east is not for me–the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes.
I hate the actor and audience business. An author should be in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment.
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.
Don’t be sucked in by the su-superior, don’t swallow the culture bait, don’t drink, don’t drink and get beerier and beerier, do learn to discriminate.
[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, “We are one in the Father: we will go back.” The Northern races said, “We are one in Christ, we will go on.
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 love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.
The search for happiness … always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.
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.
We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.
You will not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he has made his wife is as high a love as that he feltfor his mother or sister.
Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.
Nobody can have the soul of me. My mother has had, and nobody can have it again. Nobody can come into my very self again, and breathe me like an atmosphere.
I should like [people] to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which makes them act in singleness. and They only like to do the collective thing.
Democracy and equality try to denythe mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.
When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder. Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are based on wonder.
Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.
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.
Homer was wrong in saying, “Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.
The nearer a conception comes towards finality, the nearer does the dynamic relation, out of which this concept has arisen, draw to a close. To know is to lose.
The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.
But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff’s edge, like Sappho into the sea.
Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one’s friends–give me the country.
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.
Sight is the least sensual of all the senses. And we strain ourselves to see, see, see–everything, everything through the eye, inone mode of objective curiosity.
The weakness of modern tragedy[is that] transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.
Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever incalculable prompting of the creative wellhead within him. There is no universal law.
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
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.
Whatever life may be, and whatever horror men have made of it, the world is a lovely place, a magic place, something to marvel over. The world is an amazing place.
A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon’s mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry.
If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.
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.
Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.
The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion.
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.
The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.
And all the time she felt the reflection of his hopelessness in her. She couldn’t quite, quite love in hoplessness. And he, being hopeless, couldn’t ever love at all.
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.
A house o’ women is as dead as a house wi’ no fire, to my thinkin’. I’m not a spider as likes to corner myself. I like a man about, if he’s only something to snap at.
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me–and it’s rather an awful feeling. One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist.
The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.
He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. ‘Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct’ was his motto.
He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart’s privacy, he excused himself, saying, “If she hadn’t said so-and-so, it would never have happened.
I would rather sit still in a state of peace on a stone than ride in the motor-car of a multi-millionaire and feel the peacelessness of the multi-millionaire poisoning me.
The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love, only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
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.
For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another.
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody who wants to do us harm. No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.
The old ideals are dead as nails–nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman–sort of ultimate marriage–and there isn’t anything else.
When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be
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 Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.
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.
My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry — all literature in fact — to the droppings of the goats among the rocks — mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.
When man has nothing but his will to assert–even his good-will–it is always bullying. Bolshevism is one sort of bullying, capitalism another: and liberty is a change of chains.
She let him come further, his lips came and surging, surging, soft, oh soft, yet on, like the powerful surge of water, irresistible, till with a little blind cry, she broke away.
How I hate the attitude of ordinary people to life. How I loathe ordinariness! How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list. It makes my blood boil.
The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.
The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.
The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world, and everybody makes everything so easy for everyone else, that there is almost nothing to resist at all.
I should think the American admiration of five-minute tourists has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration than multitudes of bombs would have done.
Death is … a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot.
Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside.
All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.
I wonder which was more frightened among old tribes — those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests.
And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.
And what’s romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time.
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.
Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness…. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.
Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.
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.
He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.
With a woman, a man always wants to let himself go. And it is precisely with a woman that he should never let himself go … but stick to his innermost belief and meet her just there.
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
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.
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.
I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves- to be really together because we ARE together, as if it were a phenomenon, not a thing we have to maintain by our own effort.
When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.
It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that’s what I want just now.
It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man’s own religious soul that drives him on beyond women, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone.
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.
For, of course, being a girl, one‚Äôs whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl‚Äôs life mean?
The East is marvellously interesting for tracing our steps back. But for going forward, it is nothing. All it can hope for is to be fertilised by Europe, so that it can start on a new phase.
America exhausts the springs of one’s soul – I suppose that’s what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn’t grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.
If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.
No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all that there is in life, it seems to me.
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.
A man was like a child with his appetites. A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very pleasant connection.
And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.
Hate’s a growing thing like anything else. It’s the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one’s deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.
There is no evolving, only unfolding. The lily is in the bit of dust which is its beginning, lily and nothing but lily: and the lily in blossom is a ne plus ultra: there is no evolving beyond.
They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.
For God‚Äôs 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 picture must all come out of the artist’s inside, awareness of forms and figures… It is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown.
I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.–Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning.
The difference between people isn’t in their class, but in themselves. Only from the middle classes one gets ideas, and from the common people–life itself, warmth. You feel their hates and loves.
Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It’s when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life’s not worth having.
An artist is only an ordinary man with a greater potentiality–same stuff, same make up, only more force. And the strong driving force usually finds his weak spot, and he goes cranked, or goes under.
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.
There’s lots of good fish in the sea…maybe…but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.
You’re spending your life without renewing it. You’ve got to be amused, properly healthily amused. You’re spending your vitality without making any. Can’t go on you know. Depression! Avoid depression!
One should stick by one’s soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.
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.
We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.
The feelings I don’t have I don’t have. The feelings I don’t have, I won’t say I have. The felings you say you have, you don’t have. The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have.
The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.
I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.
Don’t talk to me any more about poetry for months — unless it is other men’s work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I’m fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
It is only when men lose their contact with this eternal life-flame, and become merely personal, things in themselves, instead ofthings kindled in the flame, that the fight between man and woman begins.
Most fatal, most hateful of all things is bullying…. Sensual bullying of course is fairly easily detected. What is more dangerous is ideal bullying. Bullying people into what is ideally good for them.
You feel free in Australia. There is great relief in the atmosphere – a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form. The Skies open above you and the areas open around you.
Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.
The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.
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.
And yet – and yet – one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even if everybody else is nasty about it.
Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit…. this that I tell you is my message as far as I’ve got any.
There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life; and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.
And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove.Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.
You don’t want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is allpurely secondary–and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.
The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.
Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands … anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon…. Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.
That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.
Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they‚Äôve got none to spend. That‚Äôs our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.
Aren’t I enough for you?’ she asked. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.’ (Women in Love)
You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling…. Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall.
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.
I’m not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn’t make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow…it is the honest state before the apple.
There’s nothing wrong with sexual feelings in themselves, so long as they are straightforward and not sneaking or sly. The right sort of sex stimulus is invaluable to human daily life. Without it the world grows grey.
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.
[Man’s] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun,rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun.
The nature of the infant is not just a new permutation-and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.
The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.
I am in love – and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man’s bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.
My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
All hopes of eternity and all gain from the past he would have given to have her there, to be wrapped warm with him in one blanket, and sleep, only sleep. It seemed the sleep with the woman in his arms was the only necessity.
Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.
America does to me what I knew it would do: it just bumps me. The people charge at you like trucks coming down on you — no awareness. But one tries to dodge aside in time. Bump! bump! go the trucks. And that is human contact.
To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.
It is a curious thing how poets tend to become ascetics…. Even a debauch for them is a self-flagellation. They go on the loose in cruelty against themselves, admitting that they are pandering to, and despising, the lower self.
Most men have a deadness in them that frightens me so because of my own deadness. Why can’t men get their life straight, like St.Mawr, and then think? Why can’t they think quick, mother: quick as a woman: only farther than we do?
The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan.
The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great-quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.
Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.
Gods should be iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm. Man creates a God in his own image, and the gods grow old along with the men that made them… But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard.
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 world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn’t fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can’t pigeon-hole a real new experience.
Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almostfinished the deed…. Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage.
We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realise any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience every time.
I am sure no other civilization, not even the Romans, has showed such a vast proportion of ignominious and degraded nudity, and ugly, squalid dirty sex. Because no other civilization has driven sex into the underworld, and nudity to the W.C.
In America the chief accusation seems to be one of “Eroticism.” This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty “amours,” or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?
That’s just what a woman is. She thinks she knows what’s good for a man, and she’s going to see he gets it; and no matter if he’s starving, he may sit and whistle for what he needs, while she’s got him, and is giving him what’s good for him.
The great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living termsonce had a vast and perhaps perfect science of itsown, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles.
The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn’t got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.
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.
Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.
If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishab
I love Italian opera – it’s so reckless. Damn Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.
I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories – and how contradictory they are – rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.
Marriage and deathless friendship, both should be inviolable and sacred: two great creative passions, separate, apart, but complementary: the one pivotal, the other adventurous: the one, marriage, the centre of human life; and the other, the leap ahead.
The source of all life and knowledge is in #‚Äé man and #‚Äé woman , and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge , man-being and woman-being.
My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-unconsciou s is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos.
Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.
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.
The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-crests…. always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.
I like relativity and quantum theories because I don’t understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.
The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language.
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.
The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.
She is my first, great love. She was a wonderful, rare woman – you do not know; as strong, and steadfast, and generous as the sun. She could be as swift as a white whiplash, and as kind and gentle as warm rain, and as steadfast as the irreducible earth beneath us.
My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness‚Äîwhat old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!
There is an eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun: there is an eternal vital correspondence between our nerves and the moon. If we get out of contact and harmony with the sun and moon, then both turn into great dragons of destruction against us.
Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.
I don’t believe any more in democracy. But I can’t believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.
While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs.
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.
How the horse dominated the mind of the early races especially of the Mediterranean! You were a lord if you had a horse. Far back, far back in our dark soul the horse prances…The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action in man!
And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place – even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.
Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. All the animals in Paradise enjoyed the sensual passion of coition. Not because we sinned. But because we got sex into our head.
Personality and mind, like moustaches, belong to a certain age. They are a deformity in a child…. Leave his sensibilities, his emotions, his spirit, and his mind severely alone. There is the devil in mothers, that they must provoke personalresponse from their infants.
It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh.
I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I’m sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual – we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I’m sure that is entirely wrong.
Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
… he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.
We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America — as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we’re rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it.
Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
So as long as you can forget your body you are happy and the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.
For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or “consciously” desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to a star, or you will just stay where you are.
I believe that there was a great age, a great epoch when man did not make war: previous to 2000 B.C. Then the self had not reallybecome aware of itself, it had not separated itself off, the spirit was not yet born, so there was no internal conflict, and hence no permanent external conflict.
I am convinced that the majority of people to-day have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint.
The Spirit of Place [does not] exert its full influence upon a newcomer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America…. The moment the last nuclei of Red [Indian] life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent.
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.
The mystery of the evening-star brilliant in silence and distance between the downward-surging plunge of the sun and the vast, hollow seething of inpouring night. The magnificence of the watchful morning-star, that watches between the night and the day, the gleaming clue to the two opposites.
I cannot be a materialist – but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicious luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery – such suffering, such dreadful suffering – and shall the short years of Christ’s mission atone for it all?
And that is … how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other’s face.
In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No, the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.
I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog….Only in the novel are all things given full play.
A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.
It seems to me a purely lyric poet gives himself, right down to his sex, to his mood, utterly and abandonedly, whirls himself roundtill he spontaneously combusts into verse. He has nothing that goes on, no passion, only a few intense moods, separate like odd stars, and when each has burned away, he must die.
The history of the cosmos is the history of the struggle of becoming. When the dim flux of unformed life struggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself, and broke at last into light and dark came into existence as light, came into existence as cold shadow then every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight.
There is the unknown and the unknowable which propounds all creation. This we cannot love , we can only accept it as a term of our own limitation and ratification. We can only know that from the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and that the fulfilling of these desires is the fulfilling of creation.
I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human race, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family.
She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.
We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, andis an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last.
The artist usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the dragon, in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
I can give you a spirit love, I have given you this long, long time; but not embodied passion. See, you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun…In all our relations no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses – rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in the common sense.
Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interested him more.
There is a brief time for sex, and a long time when sex is out of place. But when it is out of place as an activity there still should be the large and quiet space in the consciousness where it lives quiescent. Old people can have a lovely quiescent sort of sex, like apples, leaving the young quite free for their sort.
The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man knows the great consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy, and that is eternal. Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that is eternal. But the two are separate and never to be confused.
The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable soddingrotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less lot that make up England today. They’ve got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery it’s a marvel they can breed.
Sometimes snakes can‚Äôt slough. They can‚Äôt burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don‚Äôt care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.
But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.
The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.
You must drop all your democracy. You must not believe in ”the people.” One class is no better than another. It must be a case of Wisdom, or Truth. Let the working classes be working classes. That is the truth. There must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies.
Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.
the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one’s fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.
Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!
When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.
Previously, even in Egypt, men had not learned to see straight. They fumbled in the dark, and didn’t quite know where they were, or what they were. Like men in a dark room, they only felt their existence surging in the darkness of other creatures. We, however, have learned to see ourselves for what we are, as the sun sees us. The Kodak bears witness.
But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don‚Äôt trust anybody with your real emotions: if you‚Äôve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.
It was as if thousands and thousands of little roots and threads of consciousness in him and her had grown together into a tangled mass, till they could crowd no more, and the plant was dying. Now quietly, subtly, she was unravelling the tangle of his consciousness and hers, breaking the threads gently, one by one, with patience and impatience to get clear.
Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We‚Äôve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.
It is marriage, perhaps, which had given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the state…. It is a true freedom because it is a true fulfilment, for man, woman and children. Do we then want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State.
Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a fulfillment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata Morgana. That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.
And then she realized that his presence was the wall, his presence was destroying her. Unless she could break out, she must die most fearfully, walled up in horror. And he was the wall. She must break down the wall. She must break him down before her, the awful obstruction of him who obstructed her life to the last. It must be done, or she must perish most horribly.
The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they alwayshave done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.
The whole life-effort of man is to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain life, cloud life, thunder life, air life, earth life, sun life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator is the root meaning of religion.
The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables – piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes . . . long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness. . . .
He had made a passionate study of education, only to come, gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of consciousness. And each unit of consciousness is the living unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form, is laboriously growing.
We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do – it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.
One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towards the other soul, not away from it. . . . To love you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures.
Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.
For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.
Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.
It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if se adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it.
Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.” “And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages on the depths of the seven seas, and through the salt they reel with drunken delight and in the tropics tremble they with love and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one‚Äôs own life.
I don’t like your miserable lonely single front name. It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.
Lies About Love We are all liars, because The truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow, Whereas letters are fixed, and we live by the letter of truth. The love I feel for my friend, this year, is different from the love I felt last year. If it were not so, it would be a lie. Yet we reiterate love! love! love! as if it were a coin with fixed value instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.
Money is a sort of instinct. It’s a sort of property of nature in a person to make money. It’s nothing you do. It’s no trick you play. It’s a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on. . . But you’ve got to begin. . . You’ve got to get in. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You’ve got to beat your way in. Once you’ve done that, you can’t help it!
It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.
Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup.
The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
The Aztec gods and goddesses are, as far as we have known anything about them, an unlovely and unlovable lot. In their myths there is no grace or charm, no poetry. Only this perpetual grudge, grudge, grudging, one god grudging another, the gods grudging men their existence, and men grudging the animals. The goddess of love is goddess of dirt and prostitution, a dirt-eater, a horror, without a touch of tenderness.
When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent. Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself. And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved. Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors. For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths out of sight, in the deep living heart.
What sex is, we don’t know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty. We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there. Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.
no form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death
To our senses, the elements are four and have ever been, and will ever be for they are the elements of life, of poetry, and of perception, the four Great Ones, the Four Roots, the First Four of Fire and the Wet, Earth and the wide Air of the World. To find the other many elements, you must go to the laboratory and hunt them down. But the four we have always with us, they are our world. Or rather, they have us with them.
Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship…. And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.
Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don’t be held. Break it, and get away. Don’t get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! “Well, boy, I guess I’ll beat it.” Ah, the pleasure in saying that
Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.
That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreativebody in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.
I believe a man is born first unto himself – for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.
I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us.
In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation.
But having more freedom she only became more profoundly aware of the big want. She wanted so many things. She wanted to read great, beautiful books, and be rich with them; she wanted to see beautiful things, and have the joy of them for ever; she wanted to know big, free people; and there remained always the want she could put no name to? It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and surpass. And one never knew where one was going.
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests again, we shall shiver with cold and fright but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame… She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.
There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.
Was his life nothing? Had he nothing to show, no work? He did not count his work, anyone could have done it. What had he known, but the long, marital embrace with his wife. Curious, that this was what his life amounted to! At any rate, it was something, it was eternal. He would say so to anybody, and be proud of it. He lay with his wife in his arms, and she was still his fulfillment, just the same as ever. And that was the be-all and the end-all. Yes, and he was proud of it.
This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.
It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman – who is much of a woman – is that in the long run she is not to be had… She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation – none of them – not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life‚Äôs mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being. The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfill. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.
For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.
It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.
The Moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the Moon that pulls the tides, and the Moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the Moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. . . . When we describe the Moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness.
Is our day of creative life finished? Does there remain to us only the strange, awful afterwards of the knowledge in dissolution,the African knowledge, but different for us, who are blond and blue-eyed from the north?…. There was another way, the way of freedom. There was the paradisal entry into pure, single beingwhich accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits its own proud individual singleness, even while it loves and yields.
The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the winds, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret.
After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches…and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That’s what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that’s what my books are not and never will be…Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn’t like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.
We can understand that the Fathers of the Church in the East wanted Apocalypse left out of the New Testament. But like Judas among the disciples, it was inevitable that it should be included. The Apocalypse is the feet of clay to the grand Christian image. And down crashes the image, on the weakness of these very feet. There is Jesus–but there is also John the Divine. There is Christian love–and there is Christian envy. The former would “save” the world–the latter will never be satisfied till it has destroyed the world. They are two sides of the same medal.

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About D. H. Lawrence

Quotes by D. H. Lawrence