Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence flips the usual God-talk on its head with one surgical move: he denies God the comfortingly human trait of "knowing". Knowledge implies distance - a mind looking at a world from the outside, filing facts away. Lawrence’s God can’t be that kind of celestial librarian because Lawrence is at war with the modern obsession with intellect as the highest authority. In his universe, the disaster isn’t disbelief; it’s abstraction.

"He is things" is blunt, almost provocatively unpoetic. That’s the point. Lawrence is pushing toward an immanent divinity, a God not parked above life but thrumming inside it: bodies, trees, sex, weather, blood, the animal shudder of being alive. The line carries a quiet hostility to theological systems that reduce the sacred to propositions. If God is a set of doctrines, you can argue Him away. If God is identical with the texture of existence, then the sacred becomes harder to dismiss and harder to domesticate.

The subtext is also a rebuke to the industrial, mechanized early 20th century that Lawrence watched flatten human experience into productivity and rational control. "God doesn't know" reads like a refusal of surveillance - the idea of an all-seeing authority tracking your sins. Lawrence replaces that with a God you encounter, not a God who audits you.

Contextually, this sits neatly inside his larger project: reclaiming feeling, instinct, and the non-verbal as forms of truth. It’s theology as sensual revolt, pitched against the tidy tyranny of the purely mental.