David Herbert Lawrence

“The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.”

“Men! The only animal in the world to fear.”

“Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.”

“Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.”

“I am in love - and, my God, it is 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 have not done so already, you are wasting your life.”

“There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.”

“My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.”

“The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”

“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.”

“Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.”

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

“In every living thing there is the desire for love.”

“You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.”

“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.”

“Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.”

“The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”

“People always make war when they say they love peace.”

“Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.”

“A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”

“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.”

“They say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad fates.”

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

“Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”