D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

David Herbert Lawrence was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, travel writer, essayist, and painter. His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialisation, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four of his most famous novels – Sons and Lovers
(1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) – were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of romance, sexuality and use of explicit language.

Quotes

How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression.
I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
Here, you can't live as you like - in any way or circumstance. You're like a bit out of those coloured mosaics in the hall, you have to fit in your own set, fit into your own pattern, because you're put there from the first. But you don't want to be like a fixed bit of a mosaic - you want to fuse into life, and melt and mix with the rest of folk, to have some things burned out of you.
There are three cures for ennui: sleep, drink and travel.
Men can such the heady juice of exalted self-importance from the bitter weed of failure--failures are usually the most conceited of men.
Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

Passion
But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
For whereas the mind works in possibilities, the intuitions work in actualities, and what you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Whereas what you mentally or "consciously" desire is nine times out of ten impossible; hitch your wagon to star, or you will just stay where you are.
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.
One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.
I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.
Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.
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.

Religion