Life & Wisdom Quote by John Donne

Donne doesn’t just rehabilitate suffering; he flips its market value. “Affliction is a treasure” is an audacious bit of spiritual contraband: pain, usually treated as a debt, becomes capital. The provocation is sharpened by the second clause, “scarce any man hath enough of it,” which sounds almost like a satiric complaint about scarcity - as if misery were a luxury good rationed to the undeserving. That tonal risk is the point. Donne forces the reader to confront how much of their moral language depends on comfort.

The intent sits in the pressure point between Donne the metaphysical poet and Donne the Anglican divine. In the Christian logic he’s working, affliction is not inherently good, but instrumentally holy: it strips the ego, interrupts complacency, and makes room for dependence on God. “Treasure” signals not pleasure but yield - what suffering produces if properly interpreted. The subtext is a warning about ease: prosperity can anesthetize, smoothing over the existential problem Donne wants you to feel.

Context matters. Early modern England was saturated with death and instability: plague cycles, precarious medicine, religious whiplash, and the ever-present threat of social collapse. Donne also carried private grief and public anxiety across his career. In that world, “enough affliction” isn’t a cruel wish; it’s a corrective to a culture that mistakes good fortune for moral proof.

The line works because it’s rhetorical judo. It startles, then disciplines. If suffering can be “treasure,” the reader has to ask: treasure for what - salvation, clarity, humility - and at what cost to the stories we tell ourselves when life is going well.