Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence lands the knife with a paradox that still stings: an age proud of its awareness is, in his view, emotionally anesthetized. “Excessively conscious” isn’t praise. It’s diagnosis. Consciousness here means the modern habit of standing outside experience and monitoring it - thinking about feeling instead of feeling, translating life into ideas, categories, respectable explanations. The second sentence tightens the trap: “We know so much” names the period’s swelling faith in science, industry, and system; “we feel so little” suggests the collateral damage, a flattening of instinct, sensuality, and moral urgency.

The intent is not anti-intellectual so much as anti-disembodiment. Lawrence isn’t asking us to be ignorant; he’s accusing modern culture of using knowledge as a shield. The subtext is that “knowing” has become a performance of control: if you can name a thing, diagnose it, contextualize it, you don’t have to be moved by it. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it mimics the very split it condemns, pairing two simple clauses like a lab report, then letting the emotional deficit echo in the blank space between them.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Lawrence watched mechanization, bureaucracy, and World War I turn human beings into units - workers, soldiers, “types.” His fiction and essays push back by insisting on the body as a source of truth, not just appetite. Read now, the quote feels eerily current: infinite information, constant self-awareness, curated identities - and a creeping suspicion that our sophistication is another word for numbness.