Daily Inspiration Quote by Aphra Behn

Mortality arrives here with a curt stage-manager’s knock: “sir” makes it conversational, almost gentlemanly, while the sentence itself pulls the rug out. Behn’s line works because it refuses grand consolations. It’s not an elegy; it’s a brisk reminder delivered mid-exchange, the kind of truth a character uses to win an argument or puncture someone else’s moral performance.

The opening “Faith” is doing double duty. In Restoration dialogue it can read as a casual oath (a verbal tic, like “honestly”), but it also smuggles in the era’s anxious theology. After civil war, regicide, plague, and fire, “faith” wasn’t just private feeling; it was a public badge and a political weapon. Behn, a professional woman writing in a male-saturated theatre economy, knew how easily virtue-talk becomes theatre. She flips that. If we’re “here today, and gone tomorrow,” then piety, honor, even romance can look less like eternal principles and more like props people grab to control one another.

The intent, then, isn’t simply to brood on death. It’s to accelerate desire and expose hypocrisy. A life that short makes impatience reasonable: seize pleasure, make the risky confession, stop posturing. At the same time, it’s a quiet act of power from a dramatist who understood time as the ultimate equalizer. Kings, rakes, “sir” himself - everyone exits. The line lands with that Restoration snap: worldly, witty, slightly pitiless, and uncomfortably true.