Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Modernity loved to imagine it had outgrown superstition: one clean, rational system replacing the messy pantheon of impulses, myths, and tribal loyalties. Lawrence calls that bluff. “The day of the absolute is over” reads like an obituary for the Enlightenment fantasy that a single truth - scientific, religious, political - can organize human life without residue. His sting is that the “absolute” didn’t so much win as flatten. It promised certainty; it delivered spiritual anemia.

The kicker is “strange gods.” Lawrence doesn’t mean a quaint return to classical deities. He means the old human hunger for meaning will reassert itself, but sideways: in new cults, new worship objects, new ecstatic abandon. The adjective “strange” is doing a lot of work. These aren’t comforting traditions; they’re uncanny replacements, the kind that arrive when the official faith has been hollowed out. That eeriness is the subtext: once you discredit the absolute, you don’t get freedom as a stable endpoint. You get competition - competing devotions, identities, drives.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, with industrial life tightening its grip and World War I detonating the idea of steady progress, Lawrence watched supposedly rational societies turn feral. His line anticipates the century’s ideological religions and mass movements, but it’s also intimate: he believed the body, desire, and the non-rational are not optional parts of being human. When you deny them, they don’t disappear. They come back as “gods,” demanding tribute in forms you won’t recognize until you’re already kneeling.