Wisdom Quote by William Temple

Temple’s line flatters literature by demoting it. The book, he suggests, isn’t valuable because it is brilliant, original, or even true; it’s valuable because it survived. He pairs “books” with “proverbs” to make that point sting a little: both are portable, repeatable, and suspiciously good at outlasting the people who first uttered them. Their “chief value” comes from the “stamp and esteem of ages,” a phrase that turns culture into a mint. Time doesn’t just test ideas, it authorizes them.

The intent is conservative in the literal sense: it argues for preservation, for trusting what has been carried forward. That trust is not naïve. Temple’s wording implies a messy process of filtration. “Passed” hints at gates, institutions, classrooms, churches, libraries - the human machinery that decides what counts as worth passing on. The subtext is that canon-making is a social act, not a purely aesthetic one. We inherit books the way we inherit laws: after enough repetition, they stop feeling like choices.

Contextually, this comes out of an early modern world in which print was exploding and authority was getting slippery. When new texts proliferate, the past becomes a credential. Temple’s move is to stabilize meaning by appealing to duration. It’s also an implicit warning: novelty can be clever, but it hasn’t paid its dues. The irony is that “esteem” is as fallible as any age; what’s stamped can be propaganda, prejudice, or mere fashion. Temple makes endurance sound like proof, knowing full well it’s also a kind of power.