"As the best wine doth make the sharpest vinegar, so the deepest love turneth to the deadliest hate"
About this Quote
Lyly’s line is a Renaissance mic drop: love and hate aren’t opposites so much as adjacent rooms in the same crowded house. The metaphor does the heavy lifting. Wine doesn’t “become” vinegar by moral failure; it turns through exposure, time, and chemistry. That’s the subtext: the deadliest hate isn’t a separate emotion that arrives from nowhere, it’s intimacy spoiled. The sharper the wine, the sharper the vinegar; the deeper the love, the more lethal the betrayal feels when the bond curdles.
It also smuggles in a warning about refinement. “Best wine” signals status, taste, cultivation - the very things Elizabethan culture prized. Lyly, a writer known for the ornate, high-wire style of euphuism, uses polish to deliver a bleak psychology: the passions of the elite aren’t safer because they’re elevated; they’re more volatile because they’re invested. The sentence turns like a blade on “so,” moving from kitchen truth to emotional fatalism with the clean certainty of a proverb.
Context matters: late-16th-century court culture ran on favor, romance, and reputation, and it punished missteps publicly. In that ecosystem, affection and hostility often shared the same stage, just with different costumes. Lyly isn’t offering a Hallmark lesson about heartbreak; he’s diagnosing how closeness amplifies grievance, how knowledge of someone’s tender places becomes ammunition. The line lands because it refuses sentimental distance. It insists that the most dangerous enemy is often the one who once knew you by heart.
It also smuggles in a warning about refinement. “Best wine” signals status, taste, cultivation - the very things Elizabethan culture prized. Lyly, a writer known for the ornate, high-wire style of euphuism, uses polish to deliver a bleak psychology: the passions of the elite aren’t safer because they’re elevated; they’re more volatile because they’re invested. The sentence turns like a blade on “so,” moving from kitchen truth to emotional fatalism with the clean certainty of a proverb.
Context matters: late-16th-century court culture ran on favor, romance, and reputation, and it punished missteps publicly. In that ecosystem, affection and hostility often shared the same stage, just with different costumes. Lyly isn’t offering a Hallmark lesson about heartbreak; he’s diagnosing how closeness amplifies grievance, how knowledge of someone’s tender places becomes ammunition. The line lands because it refuses sentimental distance. It insists that the most dangerous enemy is often the one who once knew you by heart.
Quote Details
| Topic | Heartbreak |
|---|---|
| Source | Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit by John Lyly (first published 1578). It is part of the proverb-like moralizing contained in that work. |
More Quotes by John
Add to List
