“Thus it would seem that the term unconscious is only another word for life.”

Condensing Lawrence's idea of the unconscious as the active source of living individuality · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Nature
• Truth

“A soul cannot come into its own through that love alone which is unison.”

Arguing that love must preserve difference as well as create union · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Love
• Truth

“The goal of life is the coming to perfection of each single individual.”

Placing individual fulfilment at the centre of human development · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Hope
• Truth

“The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of our life, of all life.”

Expressing Lawrence's belief that consciousness extends beyond rational thought · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Nature
• Truth

“All the best part of knowledge is inconceivable.”

Suggesting that some forms of knowledge are experienced more deeply than they can be conceptualised · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Truth

“Individuality appears in defiance of all scientific law, in defiance even of reason.”

Asserting the mystery of individual existence against purely mechanical explanation · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Truth

“There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents.”

Emphasising the irreducible newness of each individual life · Book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

• Childhood
• Truth

“It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last.”

Presenting transformation as something that may demand courage and risk · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Hope
• Truth

“Sometimes snakes can't slough. They can't burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern.”

Using the snake's skin as an image for the danger of failing to change · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Mortality
• Time

“For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea.”

Rejecting grand theories of life in favour of immediate experience · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Joy
• Truth

“Sin is a queer thing. It isn't the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one's own integrity.”

Defining wrongdoing as betrayal of one's inner integrity rather than mere rule-breaking · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Faith
• Truth

“The truth of the matter is, one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade. But Melville couldn't go back: and Gauguin couldn't really go back: and I know now that I could never go back.”

Reflecting on the impossibility of recovering an abandoned past unchanged · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Memory
• Time

“Beware of absolutes. There are many gods.”

A brief warning against reducing life to a single final principle · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Faith
• Truth

“To be sincere is to remember that I am I, and that the other man is not me.”

Defining sincerity through recognition of both selfhood and difference · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Truth

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”

Advocating silence until speech is driven by genuine feeling · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Art
• Truth

“Demand nothing; accept what you see fit. Don't waste your pride or squander your emotion.”

A compact rule for restraint, self-respect and emotional economy · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Truth

“That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.”

Imagining conscious identity as only a small illuminated part of the whole self · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Solitude
• Truth

“We are not the marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are.”

Challenging the belief that conscious choice governs everything we do · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Truth

“The deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey.”

A vivid contrast between instinctive being and the argumentative conscious mind · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Truth

“Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.”

Locating freedom in obedience to one's deepest nature rather than passing preference · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Freedom
• Truth

“Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.”

Questioning easy assumptions about personal freedom · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Freedom
• Truth

“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”

Separating the meaning of a work from the intentions or opinions of its creator · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Art
• Truth

“Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth.”

Presenting art as both felt experience and a source of usable insight · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Art
• Truth

“Out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth.”

A compact statement of how fiction can disclose truth through invention · Critical study, Studies in Classic American Literature

• Art
• Truth