Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence takes a swing at the whole Western hustle religion: the belief that life is a ladder and the point is to climb. Calling consciousness "an end in itself" isn’t a dreamy platitude; it’s an accusation. He’s saying the richest human faculty - attention, sensation, awareness - gets treated like a nuisance on the way to the Real Thing: status, security, achievement, arrival. The line “we torture ourselves getting somewhere” turns ambition into self-harm, a daily ritual of denial where the body and present moment are collateral damage.

The punch comes with the trapdoor logic: “when we get there it is nowhere.” Lawrence isn’t claiming goals are fake; he’s pointing out that the promised “there” is structurally unstable. Achievement keeps moving the horizon, so arrival feels like anticlimax, not completion. That’s why “there is nowhere to get to” lands less like despair than like liberation: if the destination is a mirage, the only sane place to live is inside experience itself, fully inhabited.

Context matters. Lawrence wrote amid industrial modernity’s grinding efficiencies and the post-Victorian moral hangover, when productivity started masquerading as virtue. His work consistently rebels against the mechanization of feeling - the way modern life trains people to instrumentalize everything, even their inner lives. This sentence is Lawrence’s scalpel: it cuts through progress narratives and reveals the subtext underneath them, a fear of stillness, of being alone with consciousness without the distraction of “somewhere” to get to.