Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Herrick

Herrick’s couplet hits with the brisk assurance of a motto carved into stone, but its sweetness hides a stern ethic. “Each must” is the tell: this isn’t gentle self-help; it’s moral pressure dressed as poetic music. In “in virtue strive for to excel,” excellence isn’t talent or fame but discipline - a life actively shaped against drift, appetite, and status games. Herrick, an Anglican clergyman writing through England’s civil upheavals, knows how fragile “good life” talk becomes when the world is noisy, violent, and politically unmoored. The line offers a portable order: if history won’t behave, your conduct still can.

The second half is the sly reward. “That man lives twice” flatters without promising immortality. It suggests a kind of compound interest on living: live the “first life” well and you gain a second existence in consequence - in reputation, in memory, in the calm hindsight of having used your time deliberately. Herrick’s phrasing keeps it practical. He doesn’t say you’ll be remembered by crowds; he implies you’ll be legible, even to yourself. The “first life” implies there could be a wasted one, a life spent but not lived, and the poem quietly shames that possibility.

It works because it fuses Protestant work ethic with Renaissance humanism: self-improvement as obligation, not indulgence. The couplet feels upbeat, but its real engine is anxiety about squandered days - and a promise that virtue is the only reliable way to outlast them.