66 Quotes By David Herbert Lawrence


Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
David Herbert Lawrence on age

Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.
David Herbert Lawrence on age

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on anger

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
David Herbert Lawrence on art

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on art

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!
David Herbert Lawrence on art

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on art

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.
David Herbert Lawrence on art

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
David Herbert Lawrence on art

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on beauty

The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.
David Herbert Lawrence on beauty

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
David Herbert Lawrence on business

So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
David Herbert Lawrence on business

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on business

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on business

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.
David Herbert Lawrence on change

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on change

Be still when you have nothing to say when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.
David Herbert Lawrence on communication

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.
David Herbert Lawrence on death

Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
David Herbert Lawrence on death