D.H. Lawrence
Pansies
To A Certain Friend
You are so interested in yourself
that you bore me
thoroughly, I am unable to feel any interest in your interesting self.
Thought
Thought, I love thought.
But not the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas
I despise that self-important game.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness,
Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of consciousness,
Thought is gazing onto the face of life, and reading what can be read,
Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to conclusion.
Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,
Thought is a man in his wholeness, wholly attending.
Keep It Up
People go on singing when they have no song in them.
People go on talking when they have nothing to say.
People go on walking when they have nowhere to go.
People keep it up, because they daren't stop.
Lies About Love
We are a liars, because
the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow,
whereas letters are fixed,
and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year,
is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we reiterate love! love! love!
as if it were a coin with a fixed value
instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.
Travel Is Over
I have travelled, and looked at the world, and loved it.
Now I don't want to look at the world anymore,
there seems nothing there.
In not-looking, and in not-seeing
comes a new strength
and undeniable new gods share their life with us,
when we cease to see.
Seekers
Oh seekers, when you leave off seeking
you will realise there was never anything to seek for.
You were only seeking to lose something, not to find
something, when you went forth so vigorously in search.
Belief
Forever nameless
Forever unknwon
Forever unconceived
Forever unrepresented
yet forever felt in the soul.
Men and Women
All this talk of equality between the sexes is merely
an expression of sex-hate.
Men and women should learn tenderness to each other
and to leave one another alone.
Non-Existence
We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch
with that which can be touched but now known.
Future Religion
The future of religion is in the mystery of touch.
The mind is touchless, so is the will, so is the spirit.
First comes the death, then the pure aloneness, which
is permanent then the resurrection into touch.
Talk of Loyalty
I have noticed that people who talk a lot about loyalty
are always themselves by nature disloyal
and they fear the come-back.
Talk of Faith
And people who talk about faith
usually want to force somebody to agree with them,
as if there was safety in numbers, even for faith.
Boredom, Ennui, Depression
And boredom, ennui, depression
are long slow vibrations of pain
that possess the whole body
and cannot be localised.
The Deepest Sensuality
The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.
Lies
Lies are not a question of false fact
but of false feeling and perverted justice.
Laughter
Listen to people laughing
and you will hear what liars they are
or cowards.
Drawing Room
You sit talking in all earnestness to a woman,
hearing her talk, that is: and you know all the while
that every syllable, every accent, every intonation and
every codence is a lie:
yet you go on talking, in all earnestness.
Search for Love
Those that go searching for love
only manifest their own lovelessness,
and the loveless never find love,
only the loving find love,
and they never have to seek for it.
Search for Truth
Search for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.
And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I?
Tourists
There is nothing to look at anymore,
everything has been seen to death.
Men Like Gods
When men think they are like gods
they are usually much less than men
being conceited fools.
Conceit
It is conceit that kills us
and makes us cowards instead of gods.
Under the great Command: Know thy self, and that thou art mortal!
we have become fatally self-conscious, fatally self-important,
fatally entangled in the Laocoön coils of our conceit.
Now we have to admit we can't know ourselves, we can only know about ourselves.
And I am not interested to know about myself any more,
I only entangle myself in the knowing.
Now let me be myself,
now let me be myself, and flicker forth,
now let me be myself, in the being, one of the gods.
Self-Conscious People
O are you tangled up in yourself
poor little man, poor little man!
Is she tangled up in herself then
poor woman, poor woman!
But beware!
They are like cats with unclean claws, tangled up in nets,
and if you try to get them out
they will tear you terribly, and give you blood-poisoning.
The Optimist
The optimist builds himself safe inside a cell
and paints the inside walls sky-blue
and blocks up the door
and says he's in heaven.
Talk
I wish people, when you sit near them,
wouldn't think it necessary to make conversation
and send thin draughts of words
blowing down your neck and your ears
and giving you a cold in your inside.
So Let Me Live
So let me live that I may die
eagerly passing over from the entanglement of life
to the adventure of death, in eagerness
turning to death as I turn to beauty
to the breath, that is, of new beauty unfolding in death.
The White Horse
The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.
Conundrums
Tell me a word
that you've often heard,
yet it makes you squint
when you see it in print!
Tell me a thing
that you've often seen
yet if put in a book
it makes you turn green!
Tell me a thing
that you often do,
when described in a story
shocks you through and through!
Tell me what's wrong
with words or with you
that you don't mind the thing
yet the name is taboo.
Immoral Man
Man is immoral because he has got a mind
and can't get used to the fact.
The deep instincts, when left alone, are quite moral,
and clear intuition is more than moral,
it really makes us men.
Why don't we learn to tame the mind
instead of killing the passions and the instincts and feelings?
It is the mind which is uncouth and overweening
and ruins our complex harmony.
A Sane Revolution
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.
Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.
Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.
Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.
Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.
Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!