Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence’s line doesn’t politely demote God; it reroutes divinity into the nervous system. “Only” sounds like a debunking, but it’s a trapdoor: the sentence shrinks God as an external authority and enlarges God as an internal event. He’s not arguing for atheism so much as for a different jurisdiction. The sacred, in Lawrence’s world, isn’t primarily a doctrine to assent to or a ruler to fear; it’s an intensity you undergo. Calling God “a great imaginative experience” makes the mind not a courtroom but an organ of perception, closer to sex, art, and nature than to catechism.

The subtext is a revolt against institutional religion’s managerial style of the infinite: sermons that tidy chaos into rules, creeds that turn mystery into compliance. Lawrence, writing in the early 20th century’s churn of modernism, industrialization, and post-Victorian disillusionment, watched traditional faith lose cultural authority while psychology and aesthetics gained it. His phrasing borrows that modernist instinct: treat spiritual hunger as real, but treat metaphysical certainty as suspect.

“Imaginative” here isn’t “made up” in the cheap sense; it’s “made vivid.” Lawrence stakes out a middle position between belief and disbelief: God as a lived phenomenon that organizes feeling, desire, and meaning, whether or not there’s a cosmic landlord behind it. The line works because it refuses the usual binary. It’s both iconoclastic and devotional, insisting that the holy’s last stronghold is not the church but the imagination where experience becomes revelation.