D H Lawrence Love Quotes and Sayings

D H Lawrence Love Quotes and Sayings

#1 VII Nathaniel Hawthorne and “The Scarlet Letter”, Studies in Classic American Literature: Fantasia of the Unconscious. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Heron Books, 1969

1. And what’s romance? Usually, a nice little take 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.

#2 Selected Literary Criticism, David Herbert Lawrence, Viking Press, 1956

2. 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.

#3-5 Letter to Thomas Dunlop, 7 July 1914

3. 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.

4. To love, you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you.

5. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work…

#6 Letter to Arthur McLeod, 15 June 1912

6. I am in love — and, my God, it’s 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 haven’t done so already. You are wasting your life.

#7 Selected Critical Writings, David Herbert Lawrence, Oxford University Press, 1998

7. Having achieved and accomplished love, then the man passes into the unknown. He has become himself, his tale is told.

#8 ……Love Was Once a Little Boy, Reflection on the Death of a Porcupine: And Other Essays, Rosetta Books, 20 February 2019

8. In every living thing there is the desire, for love, or for the relationship of unison with the rest of things.

#9 Do Women Change, D. H. Lawrence: 1885-1919, University of Wisconsin Press, 1957

9. 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.

#10 The Ladybird

10. …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 multiform, else it is just tyranny, just death.

#11 Letter to John Middleton Murry, November 1913

11. A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.

#12 Poem: Search for Love

12. 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.

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Excerpt from Wikipedia: David Herbert Richards Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.
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Sayings by D H Lawrence

#1 All Knowing, The complete poems, W. Heinemann, 1957

1. All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed waste-paper baskets
unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing

#2 The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, Cambridge University Press, 6 June 2002

2. It’s not a question of making something of your life. It’s a question of living it.

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

#4-5 Studies in Classic American Literature, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 1995

4. Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

5. To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.

#6 Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, Heinemann, 1961

6. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

#7 D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, Michael Black, Michael H. Black, Cambridge University Press, 30 Apr 1986

7. I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

#8 Letter to Sallie Hopkin, 2 June 1912, The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 13 January 2000

8. 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.

#9 Women in Love, 1920

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

#10 John Galsworthy, Selected Critical Writings, David Herbert Lawrence, Oxford University Press, 1998

10. The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.

#11 Poem: Liberty’s Old Story

11. 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.

#12 Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, Delphi Classics, 17 November 2013

12. 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.

#13 Fantasia of the Unconscious, David Herbert Lawrence, M. Secker, 1923

13. 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.

#14 Letter to Ada Lawrence, 9 April 1911, Selected Letters, Anchor Books, 1961

14. 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.

#15 Poem: Self-Pity, 1929

15. 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.

#16-18 Lady Chatterley’s Lover

16. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

17. Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.

18. The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience.
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Unsourced D H Lawrence Quotes

1. 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.

2. Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.

3. Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

4. The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

5. 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.

6. I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.