D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Life does not measure up to performing... Performing is perfect.

The ideal man doesn't exist. A husband is easier to find.

I can't think of anything I hate more than a former punk - they are the most self-righteous people in the world.

You've got all these books on self help, getting to know yourself, doing the right thing, eating the so-called right foods, even down to what books you have on your shelves. People are encouraged to look to themselves first as opposed to being a part of society.

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.

Because I am Olympic champion, everyone assumes I am this perfect athlete who should never lose. Every time I step in the ring, I am expected to win.

Her life was perfect. But as was often the case, the rest of us were still adjusting.

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.

If you expect perfection from people your whole life is a series of disappointments, grumblings, and complaints.

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society... Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection--uncracked and uncrackable.

The goal is progress, not perfection!

Perfection is a polished collection of errors.

The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized and it may explode into violence.

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.

A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked Perfection.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

Perfection is the satin-lined casket of creativity and originality. If you are a perfectionist, at least stop telling everybody you're one and try to get over it yourself, alone in your home with the lights off