Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

Friendship, for Edward Young, isn’t a pleasant accessory to a respectable life; it’s the one thing that makes risk rational. “Worth all hazards” is a deliberately extreme valuation, the kind of moral overbid that a poet uses to yank the reader out of polite sentiment. Young frames friendship as a form of chosen exposure: you don’t merely enjoy a friend, you stake yourself on them. The line turns companionship into a wager, implying that safety is overrated when measured against the rare payoff of genuine loyalty.

The wording also smuggles in a critique of a calculating, status-conscious society. In an age when alliances could be social currency and friendships could be strategic, Young insists on a bond that survives the audit. “All hazards” refuses to itemize which risks are acceptable; it’s anti-bureaucratic, anti-prudent. That absolutism is the point. He’s not describing everyday friendliness, but the kind of relationship that tests character: the friend you defend at cost, the friend you follow into bad weather, the friend whose presence makes your own life feel less negotiable.

Context matters: Young writes in a moralizing, religiously inflected tradition where life is precarious and reputation can be brittle. Hazard isn’t abstract; it’s illness, debt, scandal, war, spiritual doubt. By making friendship worth the run of those dangers, he elevates it to a near-sacred commitment - not because it’s soft, but because it demands courage. The subtext is bracing: if a friendship costs you nothing, you may not have found the real thing yet.