"Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make"
About this Quote
Curiosity, Cowley suggests, isn’t a light itch for trivia; it’s an engine powerful enough to reorganize a life. By pairing it with “devotion,” he yokes a supposedly secular impulse to a sacred one, quietly arguing that the mind can generate its own kind of piety. The verb choice matters: curiosity doesn’t merely lead us somewhere, it “pilgrims make.” It manufactures identity. You don’t just visit; you become a pilgrim, someone defined by the journey, the discipline, the willingness to be changed by what you seek.
The line also smuggles in a sly democratization of holiness. Traditional pilgrimage assumes a sanctioned destination, a map endorsed by church and custom. Curiosity, by contrast, is unruly and self-authorizing. Cowley’s syntax flattens the hierarchy between the two: “no less than” insists that wonder can rival faith in intensity and seriousness. Subtext: learning is not a pastime; it’s a vocation.
Cowley writes in a 17th-century England where old certainties were being stress-tested: civil war, religious fracture, the rise of experimental science, the expanding world beyond Europe. In that atmosphere, curiosity was both celebrated and suspected - a virtue to the new natural philosophers, a temptation to moralists who worried about pride and transgression. Cowley’s couplet-like compression feels like a cultural negotiation: he grants curiosity the moral gravitas of devotion while keeping the language of pilgrimage, as if to reassure anxious readers that intellectual roaming can still be a disciplined, quasi-sacred act.
The line also smuggles in a sly democratization of holiness. Traditional pilgrimage assumes a sanctioned destination, a map endorsed by church and custom. Curiosity, by contrast, is unruly and self-authorizing. Cowley’s syntax flattens the hierarchy between the two: “no less than” insists that wonder can rival faith in intensity and seriousness. Subtext: learning is not a pastime; it’s a vocation.
Cowley writes in a 17th-century England where old certainties were being stress-tested: civil war, religious fracture, the rise of experimental science, the expanding world beyond Europe. In that atmosphere, curiosity was both celebrated and suspected - a virtue to the new natural philosophers, a temptation to moralists who worried about pride and transgression. Cowley’s couplet-like compression feels like a cultural negotiation: he grants curiosity the moral gravitas of devotion while keeping the language of pilgrimage, as if to reassure anxious readers that intellectual roaming can still be a disciplined, quasi-sacred act.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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