Success Quote by John Dryden

Familiarity, Dryden suggests, is a kind of slow vandalism: not the dramatic smashing of idols, but the quiet rubbing-off of their shine. "All objects lose by too familiar a view" isn’t a romantic complaint about boredom so much as a hard-nosed observation about attention. The more routinely you look, the less you actually see. The mind stops paying the full price of perception and starts substituting shortcuts: labels, habits, the blunt comfort of "I already know this."

Dryden is writing as a Restoration poet, in a culture newly obsessed with surfaces, taste, and public performance. In that world, value is inseparable from presentation; novelty is a social currency. The line reads like aesthetic advice - keep some distance, preserve the aura - but it also carries a sly social warning. People, too, are "objects" in the economy of reputation. Overexposure makes them legible, and legibility is dangerous: once you can predict someone, you can dismiss them.

What makes the sentence work is its cold generality. "All objects" is mercilessly broad, turning a personal insight into a law of optics and psychology. "Too familiar" is the knife twist: the problem isn’t intimacy, it’s excess - attention without reverence. Dryden’s subtext is that admiration is a managed experience. Wonder requires framing, scarcity, a little controlled ignorance. Seen too closely, even greatness risks looking like mere material.