Life & Wisdom Quote by John Lyly

"A clear conscience is a sure card" reads like Renaissance advice delivered with a gambler's grin. Lyly, a courtly writer who made his name on elegance and verbal games, frames morality not as saintly self-denial but as strategy: the kind of quiet advantage you carry into any room where people are sizing each other up.

The phrase "sure card" is the tell. It borrows the logic of playhouses and card tables, worlds Lyly knew intimately and that his audience would recognize as symbols of risk, reputation, and performance. Conscience becomes less a private spiritual state than a portable asset, a trump you can hold back until the moment turns. In an Elizabethan court culture where favor could flip overnight and a careless word could curdle into treason, inner cleanliness functions as a kind of insurance policy. If you're not hiding anything, you can't be blackmailed; if your motives are clean, your enemies have fewer handles.

There's also a subtle satire in the transaction. Lyly doesn't romanticize virtue; he prices it. The subtext is almost unnervingly modern: ethics pay. That doesn't cheapen the moral claim so much as explain its durability. A clear conscience isn't presented as holiness for its own sake, but as the only stable currency in a system built on appearances, whispers, and sudden reversals. The line works because it flatters the listener's self-interest while smuggling in a stricter standard: if conscience is your "sure card", you'd better keep it unmarked.