D.H. Lawrence: Quotes about life

D.H. Lawrence was English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. Explore interesting quotes on life.
D.H. Lawrence: 262 quotes18 likes

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Censors are dead men
set up to judge between life and death.”

D.H. Lawrence

Censors (1929)
Context: 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.

“Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars.”

D.H. Lawrence

A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars. Is not a man different, utterly different, at dawn from what he is at sunset? And a woman too? And does not the changing harmony and discord of their variation make the secret music of life?

“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love (1920), Ch. 15

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence

“Life is ours to be spent, not to
be saved.”

D.H. Lawrence

“It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”

D.H. Lawrence

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence

“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!”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love

“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”

D.H. Lawrence

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence

“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.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

“To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort⎯⎯⎯to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep⎯⎯⎯that is very beautiful, I think; that is our after-life⎯⎯⎯our immortality.”

D.H. Lawrence book Sons and Lovers

Source: Sons and Lovers (1913), Ch.11

“The tiny fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.
Quick little splinters of life,
their little lives are fun to them
in the sea.”

D.H. Lawrence

Little Fish (1929)

“Mrs Morel always said the after-life would hold nothing in store for her husband: he rose from the lower world into purgatory, when he came home from pit, and passed into heaven in the Palmerston Arms.”

D.H. Lawrence

Sons and Lovers - Edited out of the 1913 edition, restored in 1992