Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Nash

Beauty gets treated like a trophy; Nash turns it into compost. "Beauty is but a flower, which wrinkles will devour" lands with the brisk cruelty of late-Elizabethan realism: the compliment is there ("flower"), but it’s immediately undermined by time’s appetite. The verb choice matters. Wrinkles don’t merely arrive; they "devour". Aging is cast as predation, not a gentle fade-out, and that violence is the point. Nash is puncturing the courtly love tradition that inflated female beauty into an almost sacred currency. He doesn’t deny beauty’s power; he just insists it has an expiration date, and the market will not honor sentimental attachment.

The line’s force comes from its compact moral math. "But" shrinks beauty from an ideal to a temporary object; "flower" implies peak allure and fragility in the same breath. It also smuggles in a social warning: if beauty is your only capital, you’re living on a perishable asset. In Nash’s London, where plague cycles and hard economic edges made mortality feel like weather, the anti-romantic thrust reads less like bitterness than like an attempt at clarity.

Subtextually, Nash is also flexing a writer’s skepticism about surfaces. Elizabethan culture was obsessed with display - cosmetics, costume, court performance - and Nash, a satirist by temperament, distrusted the pretty lie. The line dares you to admire the bloom, then makes you picture what comes next. That discomfort is the mechanism: desire, then decay, in one breath.