Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence turns the mind into a hall of mirrors, refusing the comforting hierarchy where conscious thought is the boss and dreams are mere after-hours noise. The line works because it stages uncertainty as a lived condition, not a philosophical puzzle: the speaker isn’t pondering an abstract paradox so much as admitting that the self is porous, constantly rewritten by forces it can’t fully audit.

The intent is characteristically Lawrencean. He distrusted the overconfident “rational” modern subject and kept insisting that desire, instinct, and the body carry their own intelligence. By making causality undecidable, he undercuts the Victorian and early modern habit of treating consciousness as a clean command center. Dreams aren’t symbols to be decoded and filed away; they’re active agents, capable of seeding the day’s obsessions. And thoughts, for their part, aren’t purely deliberate; they can be the mind rehearsing what the unconscious has already staged.

The subtext is a quiet provocation: if your thoughts may be dream-born, how much of your conviction is actually chosen? It’s also a defense of the artist’s inner weather. For a writer, the border between “idea” and “image” is the whole workshop. Lawrence is effectively describing creativity as feedback loop, where imagination and perception continuously infect each other.

Context matters: he’s writing in an era newly intoxicated with Freud and newly disillusioned with industrial rationality. Lawrence doesn’t present psychoanalysis as a solved system; he borrows its permission to take the irrational seriously, then leaves the question open. The unresolved grammar is the point.