D. H. Lawrence Quotes

I choose to live, not just exist.

Every character is asking: 'What's my place? Why am I here? I don't want the answer to be 'Just because.' You find your own purpose. Each finds the reason to be here and how to contribute.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Nature, philosophy and social issues are the three things that always occupy my mind. You do not have any power over others but can only change yourself.

Bader's philosophy was my philosophy. His whole attitude to life was mine.

Changing your nature is the hardest thing to do. But I discovered that you can be who you choose to be.

It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.

Everybody is determined by his own experience.

Everybody has to know for themselves what they're capable of.

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

People in life take on certain stories and say, 'I'm going to be defined by this story and I'm going to live up to every inch of this story.' Sometimes you realize the story isn't fulfilling you and in fact you're not living the life that you're given.

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.

I intend to be me. Whatever that is.

How do you sustain yourself when all the old structures people looked to for support - religion, family, ethnic solidarity - are crumbling, or feel so false that you refuse to avail yourself of them? What comes next?

I want the subject to be in control. Because they will give me something I couldn't possibly know about them.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

I want to see, that's all. This is my life. I want to see.

Toward the end of his life, one can sense that he was no longer thinking his way into the minds of others, causing them to speak on his behalf, but that he was now speaking for himself.