David Herbert Lawrence

“Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.”

“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.”

“The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.”

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

“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.”

“The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Be still when you have nothing to say when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”

“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.”

“Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.”

“The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.”

“The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.”

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

“God is only a great imaginative experience.”

“Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.”

“The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.”