Time & Perspective Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Wisdom, in Lawrence's hands, is less a virtue than a social atmosphere - airless, heavy, and faintly self-congratulatory. Calling it "bad taste" is the dagger: he frames constant seriousness not as moral strength but as a breach of aesthetic and human etiquette, the kind of performance that makes everyone else feel quietly judged. The simile lands because a funeral is where intensity is appropriate precisely because it's temporary; keep that mood running indefinitely and it curdles into a ritual of restraint that denies the pulse of ordinary life.

Lawrence was writing against an early 20th-century culture that prized propriety, rational control, and a sort of respectable bleakness. His work repeatedly argues that modernity's obsession with intellect and discipline can become a spiritual anemia. Here, "wise all the time" implies a person who has turned caution, insight, and moralizing into an identity - someone who treats living as an audit. The funeral image adds another layer: perpetual wisdom isn't just boring, it's anti-erotic, anti-play, anti-risk. It hints at a society mourning itself before it's even dead.

The intent isn't to bash thinking; it's to defend fluctuation: moods, impulses, the right to be foolish, sensual, inconsistent. Lawrence suggests that wisdom has to be punctuated by unguardedness to stay humane. Otherwise it's just a long face mistaken for depth.