Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Money is the oldest soft-focus filter, and Dryden knows it. "All heiresses are beautiful" lands like a compliment but functions as a needle: it punctures the idea that beauty is some pure, natural fact. In Dryden's world, beauty is negotiated - by inheritance law, by marriage markets, by the hunger of men who can do arithmetic. The line’s comic bite comes from its blunt absolutism. "All" doesn’t describe reality; it exposes the social hallucination that wealth reliably produces desire.

Dryden wrote in Restoration England, when court culture was a spectator sport and marriage was one of its main transactions. An heiress wasn’t just a woman with fortune; she was a political asset, a way to stabilize estates, buy status, patch up ruined families. In that environment, "beautiful" becomes a word that means "worth pursuing" - a verdict issued by the surrounding crowd more than a property of the person herself. The subtext is cynical and precise: attraction is often ambition dressed up as taste.

There’s also a quiet gendered cruelty. The heiress is reduced to her function, her body treated as an annex to her money. Yet Dryden’s sarcasm isn’t only aimed at women; it skewers the men and institutions that pretend romance is disinterested while circling an inheritance like sharks around a lantern. The line works because it refuses moral lecturing. It simply describes a social reflex so familiar it still reads like a contemporary dunk on status-driven desire.