D. H. Lawrence Real Quotations

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass.

The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience.

The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.

One doesn't know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one's friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one.

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it.

The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. It is the mind which is the Augean stables, not language.

That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreativebody in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.

The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived fromthe very God who bade them be not conscious of it.

The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men's theories of women, as they alwayshave done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it's because she doesn't quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man's picture of woman to live up to.

The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.

America exhausts the springs of one's soul - I suppose that's what it exists for. It lives to see all real spontaneity expire. But anyhow it doesn't grind on an old nerve as Europe seems to.

Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really.

But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Don’t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you’ve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame... She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

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.

The map appears to us more real than the land.

Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.

An illusion which is a real experience is worth having.