Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Percy

Percy’s couplet trades in the oldest literary contraband: balance dressed up as inevitability. “Every white will have its black” isn’t just a tidy nod to contrast; it’s a moral technology. The line turns life into a set of paired opposites, implying that pleasure and pain arrive as matched parcels, pre-sorted by nature. That’s the seduction: if sweetness must come with sourness, then disappointment stops being a personal failure and becomes part of the design.

As an 18th-century writer and editor steeped in ballads and the period’s taste for aphorism, Percy is working in a culture obsessed with order, proportion, and “sense.” The couplet moves like a proverb you’re meant to remember and repeat, the kind of portable wisdom that smooths experience into something narratable. Its music does a lot of the persuasion. The symmetry of “every...its...” clicks shut like a clasp, making contingency feel like law.

The subtext is a gentle corrective to entitlement. Don’t expect unmixed joys; don’t interpret hardship as exceptional. But there’s also a darker comfort here: if the world is built on opposites, you can stop arguing with it. That’s why the phrasing matters. “Will have” is not “may have.” It’s fate with a polished finish, turning volatility into something that sounds almost fair.