“Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new.”

A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of spring, the passion of midsummer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of winter of the long nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the ne…" by D.H. Lawrence?
D.H. Lawrence photo
D.H. Lawrence 131
English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary crit… 1885–1930

Related quotes

Candace Bushnell photo

“There is a thin line between attraction and repulsion”

Candace Bushnell (1958) American author

Source: Unknown Book 11676291

James Anthony Froude photo

“Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion.”

Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet?

Edith Stein photo

“The distinction of the female sex is that a woman was the person who was permitted to help establish God's new kingdom; the distinction of the male sex is that redemption came through the Son of Man, the new Adam.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Separate Vocations of Man and Woman According to Nature and Grace (1932)

William Blake photo

“Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Argument
1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

Camille Paglia photo
Preston Manning photo
Ambrose Bierce photo
V.S. Naipaul photo

“The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today.”

V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry

"Our Universal Civilization" in The New York Times (5 November 1990) https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/05/opinion/our-universal-civilization.html
Context: The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn't always universal; it wasn't always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial taint, which still causes pain. … This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

Rick Riordan photo
Fortunato Depero photo

“Futurism attracted me and made me better, gave me a new strength, showed me new fields and possibilities.”

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) Italian painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer

Source: So I think, so I paint (1947), p. 14; Cited in: Maurizio Scudiero, ‎David Leiber, ‎Fortunato Depero (1986) Depero futurista & New York: il futurismo e l'arte pubblicitaria, p. 112

Related topics