Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

Quarles writes like a man watching the ground shift under his feet, and the sentence moves with that nervous, 17th-century precision: fear and confidence are not emotions to “have,” but instruments to calibrate. The line is built on a pair of hard limits. First, fear belongs only in the territory where your labor can actually change the outcome. Second, confidence belongs only where blind luck can’t snatch it away. Everything else is self-indulgence dressed up as prudence.

The subtext is almost modern in its disdain for performative anxiety. Quarles isn’t offering comfort; he’s policing attention. Worrying about what you can’t alter becomes a kind of vanity, a way to feel busy without doing anything. On the flip side, feeling secure about anything contingent is a moral error, not just a tactical one. His language (“folly,” “deprived”) suggests that misplaced certainty isn’t merely naive; it’s spiritually dangerous because it tempts you into thinking the world is owed to you.

Context matters. Quarles is a devotional poet writing in an England roiled by political instability and religious conflict, where “fortune” isn’t a cute metaphor but a daily fact: plague, patronage, war, confiscation. The rhetorical force comes from its tight antithesis and repeated parallel structure, a kind of mental drill. He’s training readers to separate what belongs to agency (industry) from what belongs to contingency (fortune), then to live inside that boundary without melodrama. It’s stoicism filtered through Protestant moral accounting: work where work works; pray where it doesn’t.