Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence’s line is a warning shot at anyone who wants truth served neat, like a label on a jar. “Vital truth” isn’t a dead fact; it’s lived knowledge, the kind you arrive at through friction with its opposites. The sentence turns on “memory”: truth, for Lawrence, is not pure and isolated but haunted by everything it excludes. If it can’t “remember” what it isn’t, it hardens into dogma.

The phrasing matters. “Contains” suggests something almost bodily, a truth with an interior life. And “all that for which it is not true” widens the frame beyond simple contradiction. He’s talking about the limits of any statement when it meets different temperaments, bodies, relationships, classes. A proposition may be true in one register of human experience and false in another; the honest version carries that awareness inside it. The subtext is anti-programmatic: systems that claim total coverage (moral, political, even scientific when it overreaches into the soul) are suspect precisely because they forget their own blind spots.

Contextually, Lawrence writes in a modernist moment allergic to Victorian certainties, but also scarred by mechanized modern life and, later, war. His novels and essays keep insisting that intellect alone can’t own the whole human. This line performs that worldview: it makes truth dynamic, conditional, intimate. Not relativism as shrugging indifference, but truth as a force that stays alive by acknowledging the pressure of what it cannot fully name.