Love Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence frames love not as a pleasant discovery but as a hard-won discipline, the kind you earn the way you earn a scar: by living through what you can’t shortcut. “One must learn” strips romance of its supposed spontaneity. Love, for him, is apprenticeship. It demands practice, failure, relapse into selfishness, and the bruising recognition that desire alone doesn’t make you capable of intimacy.

The line about “a good deal of suffering” isn’t melodrama; it’s Lawrence’s refusal of the Edwardian-era fantasy that refinement and good manners naturally produce emotional maturity. Suffering is the tuition fee that breaks the ego’s delusion of self-sufficiency. In Lawrence’s fiction, bodies and instincts aren’t decorative details; they’re the battlefield where people confront fear, power, dependency, and shame. You don’t reach love by becoming more “perfect.” You reach it by being dismantled enough to stop treating another person as an accessory to your own narrative.

The quiet kicker is his directional claim: “the journey is always towards the other soul.” It’s a rebuke to the modern habit (and not just modern) of making love a mirror, a self-improvement project, a proof of worth. Lawrence insists that love’s telos is outward, an ethical and existential relocation from “me” to “you.” The subtext is almost combative: if your romance is mainly self-expression, it’s not love yet. It’s rehearsal.