Life & Wisdom Quote by Ludovico Ariosto

Ariosto’s line lands like a prayer that’s already exhausted from being repeated. “From heresy, frenzy and jealousy, good Lord deliver me” isn’t a grand theological posture so much as a bleak inventory of forces that unmake people from the inside out. The genius is in the grouping: heresy (public, ideological deviance), frenzy (private, emotional disarray), jealousy (intimate, relational poison). He stitches together the political, the psychological, and the erotic into one triad of ruin, suggesting they’re not separate categories but the same fire seen from different angles.

In Ariosto’s world - early 16th-century Italy, court culture, religious scrutiny, and constant factional tension - “heresy” isn’t an abstract sin. It’s a career-ending, body-threatening accusation. Invoking it alongside “frenzy” and “jealousy” quietly implies that the most dangerous madness may be social: the crowd’s certainty, the court’s whispers, the way suspicion metastasizes into prosecution. The line performs piety while also revealing how precarious piety is when belief is policed.

As a poet best known for Orlando Furioso, a masterpiece fascinated by the thin membrane between reason and obsession, Ariosto writes like someone who has watched desire become a weapon. “Deliver me” is not triumphant; it’s defensive. The subtext is that the speaker can’t out-argue these forces or out-discipline them. He needs rescue because the self is porous: ideology can infect, passion can hijack, and jealousy can rewrite reality. The prayer doubles as a diagnosis of the era’s anxieties - and of the human tendency to turn conviction into chaos.