Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Even kings rot. Dryden’s line delivers that blunt truth with the cool authority of a man living through England’s most humiliating political lesson: that the crown is not a law of nature, it’s a temporary arrangement propped up by ceremony, violence, and collective belief.

“All things are subject to decay” isn’t just moralizing about mortality; it’s an assertion about institutions. “Things” includes bodies, reputations, empires, and the stories that keep them standing. Dryden writes in a century that watched the unthinkable become policy: civil war, regicide, a republic, and then the Restoration. Power didn’t merely change hands; it revealed its own contingency. The sentence moves from the general (everything decays) to the pointed (monarchs must obey), tightening the screw. By the time “fate summons” arrives, the king is already diminished to a subject of forces he can’t legislate away.

The subtext is both chastening and strategic. In a culture where allegiance could be a career hazard, appealing to “fate” lets Dryden speak about political vulnerability without naming specific culprits. Fate is the safe accuser: impersonal, irresistible, and therefore rhetorically unassailable. Yet the jab lands anyway. Monarchs, who are supposed to be the source of obedience, are grammatically flipped into the obedient. The line’s neat, inevitable cadence mimics the inevitability it describes: even sovereignty has an endpoint, and it arrives on someone else’s schedule.