Life & Wisdom Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence is taking a knife to the smug confidence of purely mental certainty. “The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it” isn’t a casual swipe at logic; it’s a diagnosis of how argument becomes theater. The mind, for Lawrence, is a gifted press secretary: it can manufacture reasons on demand, retrofit evidence, and call the whole performance “proof.” The barb lands because it hits a modern habit we still recognize - the way intellect can launder desire, fear, status-seeking into respectable conclusions.

Then he pivots to his alternative tribunal: “my body” and “intuitional consciousness.” That’s not anti-thinking so much as anti-disembodiment. Lawrence is insisting that belief isn’t a purely verbal contract you sign with yourself; it’s something your nervous system has to consent to. “Response” is the key word. He wants ideas to register as lived reality - felt, resisted, affirmed - rather than merely “held.” It’s a standard designed to block the mind’s talent for self-deception.

The context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, Lawrence is reacting against industrial modernity, mechanized life, and a culture that prizes rational mastery while flattening instinct, sexuality, and feeling into problems to be managed. His fiction and essays repeatedly argue that over-intellectualization produces a kind of spiritual anemia. The subtext is a warning: if you let the mind run unchecked, it will build elegant prisons and call them philosophies. Lawrence’s provocation is to treat the body as an epistemology - a lie detector for what we claim to believe.