Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence is smuggling a whole revolt into that prim little phrase "one never can know". He’s not romanticizing confusion; he’s taking a scalpel to the era’s confidence that the self is legible if you just apply enough willpower, morality, or analysis. "Whys and wherefores" sounds almost bureaucratic, the language of people who want passion to submit a form in triplicate. Then he detonates it with "passional changes" - not love as a stable identity, but desire as weather, as biology, as a force that moves through you and rearranges the furniture.

The intent is defensive and liberating at once: stop demanding a rational autopsy for every shift in feeling. In Lawrence’s world, that demand is itself a kind of violence, a way society polices the body by insisting it explain itself in respectable terms. The subtext is also a warning against the modern habit of turning emotion into a courtroom: if you can justify it, you can keep it; if you can’t, you’re guilty or fickle. Lawrence refuses the premise. Passion changes because humans change, because relationships are not contracts signed by a single, permanent "self."

Context matters: Lawrence writes in the early 20th century, when Freud is making the psyche newly discussable, industrial modernity is reorganizing everyday life, and British respectability is still pretending it can domesticate sex. The line lands as a counter-credos to both Victorian moral certainty and the emerging fantasy that psychology can explain everything. It works because it’s phrased like common sense, but it’s really an attack on the cult of explanation.