Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Misanthropy is easy; Lawrence makes it diagnostic. The revulsion in "hideous and nauseating" isn’t just social fatigue, it’s bodily recoil - a modernist writer treating society as something you can physically catch. Then he snaps the focus tighter: not "people" in the abstract, but a particular arrangement of people, divided into "owners and owned". The phrasing is blunt to the point of barbaric clarity, as if politeness itself would be a lie.

What gives the line its bite is the refusal to offer an innocent side. Owners aren’t simply villains and the owned aren’t simply victims; they’re "two sides" of the same pathology. That metaphor does more than insult capitalism or class hierarchy. It implies complicity, dependence, a shared infection: the owner needs the owned to be an owner, the owned is forced into a selfhood defined by possession and being possessed. Lawrence is allergic to systems that turn human intimacy into an economic relation, and he writes as if the moral stain is also a sensory one.

Context matters: Lawrence is writing in the shadow of industrial England and the psychic wreckage of World War I, when mass society, mechanized labor, and bureaucratic life were remaking the idea of the individual. His broader project was to rescue aliveness - instinct, erotic vitality, unpoliced feeling - from what he saw as deadening modern arrangements. The line’s intent isn’t to withdraw into solitude as a lifestyle choice; it’s to indict a social order so warped that "living with people" has become indistinguishable from living inside the symptoms.