David Herbert Lawrence

Life is beautiful, as long as it consumes you. When it is rushing through you, destroying you, life is gorgeous, glorious. It's when you burn a slow fire and save fuel, that life's not worth having.

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

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

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

The great mass of humanity should never learn to read or write.

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.

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority.

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

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

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.

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

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.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.