One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no termof comparison.

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

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 novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

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

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking.

The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy.

He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

“When I hear modern people complain of being lonely then I know what has happened. They have lost the cosmos.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved.

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.

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit and the long journey towards oblivion. The apples falling like great drops of dew to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

When I wish I was rich, then I know I am ill.

In his dark eyes was a deep misery which he wore with the same ease and pleasantness as he wore his close-sitting clothes.

Religion was fading into the background. He had shovelled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right or wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one’s God. Now life interested him more.

The mosquito knows full well, small as he is he’s a beast of prey. But after all he only takes his bellyful, he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.

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.

Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.

Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.

Why, why are people all balls of bitter dust? Because they won’t fall off the tree when they’re ripe. They hang on to their old positions when the position is overpast, till they become infested with little worms and dry-rot.

I think societal instinct much deeper than sex instinct – and societal repression much more devastating.

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff’s edge, like Sappho into the sea.

Hate’s a growing thing like anything else. It’s the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one’s deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.

The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one’s wildest imagination.

Man is a thought-adventurer.

I like to write when I feel spiteful; it’s like having a good sneeze.

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed….

Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.

Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea.

It’s bad taste to be wise all the time, like being at a perpetual funeral.

To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says.

To penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery-back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.

Give up bearing children and bear hope and love and devotion to those already born.

The love between man and woman is the greatest and most complete passion the world will ever see, because it is dual, because it is of two opposing kinds.

Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

Build then the ship of death, for you must take the longest journey, to oblivion.

Some things can’t be ravished. You can’t ravish a tin of sardines. And so many women are like that: and men. But the earth… .

For God’s sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.

The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action.

Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life As Rome denied Etruria And mechanical America Montezuma still.

There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.

Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.

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

Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.

The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.

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

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

I am part of the sun as my eye is of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.

And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.

There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.

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

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.

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.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

Sleep is a hint of lovely oblivion.

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

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.

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.

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night.

If we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us out of the imminent night.

Perhaps you’re a slave to your own idea of yourself.

Man has little needs and deeper needs. We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.

Now in November nearer comes the sun down the abandoned heaven.

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent.

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.

She had borne so long this cruelty of belonging to him and not being claimed by him.

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

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.

I’d be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling. This is what is the matter with us: we are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars. Love has become a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the Tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.

Now the only decent way to get something done is to get it done by somebody who quite likes doing it.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

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.

Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.

Where sanity is there God is.

Tragedy looks to me like man in love with his own defeat. Which is only a sloppy way of being in love with yourself.

I shall always be a priest of love.

One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.

The journey of love has been rather a lacerating, if well-worth-it, journey.