Love & Passion Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence turns “Reason” into a flirt: a “supple nymph” who won’t sit still for the tidy authority of logic. It’s a deliberately mischievous personification, swapping the courtroom for the bedroom and making rationality less a judge than a creature of appetite. The metaphors do the heavy lifting. “Slippery as a fish” isn’t just playful; it implies that the harder you clutch at reason, the faster it wriggles free. The old Enlightenment promise - that reason can be pinned down into clean syllogisms - is exposed as a kind of wishful thinking.

The jab at “syllogistic truth” is Lawrence’s way of mocking the Victorian and early modern faith in system-building: the idea that if you argue correctly, you arrive at reality. He suggests our minds don’t actually work that way. We’re seduced by what feels alive, paradoxical, even ridiculous. A good “absurdity” has heat; it moves. A syllogism can be airtight and still miss the point.

Context matters: Lawrence is writing in the wake of World War I, at a moment when rational progress narratives looked grotesque. Mechanized slaughter had been organized by “reasonable” men, using “reasonable” tools. No wonder he’s suspicious of reason’s moral bragging rights.

The subtext isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-sterile. Lawrence is arguing for a truth that arrives sideways: through instinct, art, sexuality, myth, contradiction. “The absurdity may turn out truer” isn’t an excuse for nonsense; it’s a warning that life regularly humiliates our neat arguments, and that what sounds irrational can carry the deeper accuracy of lived experience.