Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence’s jab lands because it flips a moral cliché into a status insult. “Be on the side of the angels” is the stock Victorian posture: behave, signal virtue, line up with the officially approved goodness. Lawrence answers with a perversely aristocratic recoil: too lowering. Not “too hard,” not “too demanding,” but beneath you. The phrase makes morality sound like a stoop, a loss of altitude, a surrender of dignity to a pious crowd.

The intent is less to praise evil than to attack sanctimony as a social technology. Angels, in Lawrence’s mouth, are the mascots of respectable opinion: the churchy, the tidy-minded, the people who confuse purity with life. To join them is to accept a prepackaged script of righteousness that flattens desire, contradiction, and honest appetite. Lawrence always distrusted “idealism” when it became a disinfectant, a way of bleaching the body and the messy psyche into something acceptable. His fiction keeps insisting that the human animal doesn’t get saved by being good; it gets saved, if at all, by being real.

Context matters: writing in the long shadow of industrial England, class propriety, and the moralizing aftermath of war, Lawrence saw moral consensus as coercion dressed up as kindness. “Lowering” suggests the spiritual equivalent of doffing your hat to the dominant order. The line needles readers who crave moral alignment as social safety. It dares you to risk disapproval, to refuse the comforting optics of virtue, and to suspect that “the angels” may be just another committee.