Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence turns “respectability” into a stalking animal, then issues a gleefully violent prescription: strangle it. The line is almost perversely celebratory, as if the only thing standing between the addressee and real life is a well-dressed, well-mannered predator nipping at their heels. “Invincible” is the key barb. Respectability isn’t just an annoying social expectation; it’s the kind of moral armor that never seems to crack, precisely because it masquerades as virtue.

Lawrence’s intent is less to shock for sport than to diagnose a paralysis. In his world, respectability is an internalized policeman: it edits desire, sanitizes speech, and pre-approves behavior until the self becomes a careful performance. “Dogs your steps” suggests constant surveillance, the way middle-class propriety follows you into private life, turning intimacy and instinct into something you manage rather than feel. The fantasy of strangling is a fantasy of interruption - of finally breaking the loop of self-censorship.

Context matters: Lawrence wrote amid early 20th-century British moral rigidity, with its tight scripts around sex, class, and “proper” conduct, and he spent much of his career in conflict with censors and tastemakers. His fiction insists that the body and the unconscious aren’t embarrassing add-ons to intellect but central engines of truth. So the sentence reads like a lettered exorcism: kill the thing that keeps you palatable. Not to become reckless, but to become unedited.