Justice & Law Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence treats love less like a vow and more like a wild plant: gorgeous, stubborn, and allergic to cultivation. Calling it "the flower of life" sounds romantic until he adds the barbs - it "blossoms unexpectedly and without law". That phrase isn’t just poetic; it’s a direct challenge to the Edwardian machinery that tried to legislate desire through class propriety, marriage codes, and moral surveillance. Love, for Lawrence, doesn’t politely arrive when society is ready. It breaks the rules because it originates somewhere deeper than rules.

The command tone is the real tell: "must be plucked". This isn’t wistful; it’s urgent, almost predatory. He’s pushing against the fantasy that the right feelings will wait for the right conditions. "Where it is found" implies chance, even mess - love appears in imperfect places, between the wrong people, at inconvenient times. The subtext is Lawrence’s recurring suspicion that restraint is often just fear wearing a tuxedo.

Then comes the tonal swerve that makes the line land: "enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration". That "hour" shrinks romance to something mortal and local. It’s not cynicism exactly, but it is anti-sentimental: love is real precisely because it is temporary, because it demands presence rather than promises.

Written by a novelist obsessed with vitality and the body in an era wobbling toward modernity and war, the quote reads like a manifesto for lived intensity over respectable permanence - a reminder that the most disciplined life can still be outflanked by a single, lawless bloom.