D. H. Lawrence Quotes

I have no Napoleonic dream. I'm just hard-working and pragmatic.

Mix idealism with realism and add hard work. This will often bring much more than you could ever hope for.

I like hard work and I don’t like pretending things are perfect.

Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.

All of man’s work is a bloody business. That fact, today, is considered foolish, affairs are finished cleverly with words alone, and jobs that require effort are avoided. I would like young men to have some understanding of this.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

God save me from idealists.

Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

It was closer to manual labor than shooting a film. I always think of something Michael Caton-Jones told me: 'Pain is temporary. Film is forever.'

Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather bring about his own ruin than his preservation.

A lot of times, people say that if you work hard and never give up, it will always work out, which is a great message. However, that's not always the case.

I have learned that real angels don't have gossamer white robes and Cherubic skin, they have calloused hands and smell of the days' sweat.

And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

'Realistic dreamer' is not an oxymoron.

I'd describe myself as a pragmatist tinged with idealism.

Playing golf is not hot work. Cutting sugar cane for a dollar a day - that's hot work. Hotter than my first wrist watch.

Idealism and realism meet in the actual.

If I believe in something, I will fight for it, with all I have. But I do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than nothing.

I'm sick of my own romanticism!

I never liked to work, I mean manual work.

The wino and I know the pain of back bustin'.

Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.