Quotes by David Herbert Lawrence

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

"All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent."

"People always make war when they say they love peace."

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

"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."

"Money is our madness, our vast collective madness."

"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."

"In every living thing there is the desire for love."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."