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

“A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.”

“No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer.”

“…[like] being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consists in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom.”

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. What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his “soul.” Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.

In every living thing there is the desire for love. 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. Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved. 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. The living moment is everything. Live your life so that your nights are not full of regrets.

“One realm we have never conquered: the pure present.”

Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless. You live by what you thrill to, and there’s the end of it.

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. One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.

“When love turns into dust, money becomes the substitution.”

No form of love is wrong, so long as it is love, and you yourself honour what you are doing. Love has an extraordinary variety of forms! And that is all there is in life, it seems to me. But I grant you, if you deny the variety of love you deny love altogether. If you try to specialize love into one set of accepted feelings, you wound the very soul of love. Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny, just death. Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation.

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forests 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, and passion will make our bodies taut with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down, we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper. When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread. Beauty is a mystery. You can neither eat it nor make flannel out of it. Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. […] A warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot. 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. The only rule is, do what you really, impulsively, wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion. The final aim is not to know, but to be…. You’ve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. “Be yourself” is the last motto.

The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in an entire nakedness of body and spirit…. this that I tell you is my message as far as I’ve got any.

“The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love.”

“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.”

“It doesn’t matter when we die, so long as we live fulfilling the deepest desire that is in us. And a life which is a denial of the deepest desire is much worse than any death, it is a sheer lie.”

“But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”

***

~David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct.

Excerpts from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Late Essays and Articles.

©Excellence Reporter 2023