Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence slips a knife into a very specific youthful delusion: the belief that love automatically comes with shared priorities. The sentence moves like a confession, but it’s also a diagnosis. “I cannot cure myself” frames the problem as chronic, almost bodily, the way Lawrence often treats emotional life as something visceral rather than purely mental. He’s not bragging about sensitivity; he’s admitting to a stubborn infection of hope.

The sting sits in “that most woeful of youth’s follies.” Youth, here, isn’t innocence so much as a kind of arrogant optimism: the assumption that being cared for guarantees being understood. Lawrence separates “those who care about us” from “the things that mean much to us,” exposing how affection can remain sincere while still missing the mark. The subtext is brutally modern: people can love you and still not show up for your inner life; they can be loyal to you but indifferent to your art, your politics, your private obsessions. Care is not curiosity.

It also reads as a writer’s grievance sharpened into general truth. Lawrence lived inside constant friction - with family, lovers, patrons, censors - and wrote from the premise that intimacy doesn’t automatically produce alignment. The line’s power is its refusal to sentimentalize relationships. It concedes that disappointment isn’t always betrayal; sometimes it’s just the gap between two separate centers of meaning, each stubbornly real.