Book detail: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
The Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) is a meticulously curated compilation of the renowned author's literary output. This collection offers readers a comprehensive view of Lawrence's writing, accompanied by illustrative elements that enrich the narrative. It includes novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, showcasing the breadth of Lawrence's literary achievements.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
Read more
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“Poe tried alcohol, and any drug he could lay his hands on. He also tried any human being he could lay his hands on.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“The soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you're married and her name's Bertha”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“What the eye doesn't see and the mind doesn't know, doesn't exist.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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!”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene and dead ideas become obsessions.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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--”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve 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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“You can't insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they’ve got none to spend. That’s our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)