D. H. Lawrence

“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 more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.”

“God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.”

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

“All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.”

“I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.”

“All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.”

“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,...”

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

“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 cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.”

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

“The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.”

“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.”

“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 soul is a very perfect judge of her own motions, if your mind doesn't dictate to her.”

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

“Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.”

“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.”

“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.”