Happiness Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence doesn’t flatter the reader’s intelligence; he pickpockets it. “All that we know is nothing” is less a mystical slogan than a provocation aimed at the modern mind that treats information as virtue. The insult lands in the image: “crammed wastepaper baskets.” Knowledge, piled up indiscriminately, becomes the very thing you meant to throw away. Lawrence’s contempt isn’t for thought itself, but for thought as hoarding: facts as status, opinions as insulation, learning as a way to avoid being changed.

The saving clause pivots on a strangely bracing phrase: “that which laughs at all our knowing.” He’s gesturing toward a force bigger than rational mastery - instinct, eros, the body, the unruly pulse of life, even the sacred - but he refuses to sanctify it. It laughs. That laugh matters: it’s corrective, unpious, a check on human self-importance. The subtext is that the world exceeds our categories, and that a certain kind of seriousness (the sort that turns ideas into dogma) is spiritually anesthetizing.

Context sharpens the edge. Lawrence writes out of an early 20th-century crisis of confidence: industrial modernity, mechanization, a civilization newly proud of its systems and newly numb to experience. He watched “progress” produce both comfort and catastrophe, and he distrusted the cerebral pose that could explain everything while feeling nothing. The line isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-suffocation: know things, yes, but stay in contact with whatever can still mock your certainty into humility - and back into aliveness.