Education Quote by Francis Quarles

Life, Quarles suggests, is less a morality play than a card table: unfair, unpredictable, and mildly rigged. The genius of the line is how it refuses the comforting fiction that virtue earns you better “cards.” Fortune deals; you receive. That opening concession to randomness is doing a lot of work in a 17th-century context saturated with providential thinking. Quarles, a devotional poet writing through plague cycles, civil unrest, and the gathering storm of the English Civil War, knew the temptation of reading hardship as divine bookkeeping. He sidesteps that trap by shifting the moral action away from the deal and onto the play.

“Then let wisdom make you a good gamester” is both counsel and rebuke. It flatters the reader with agency, but it also scolds self-pity: bad luck is real; wallowing is optional. “Wisdom” here isn’t abstract intelligence; it’s practical spiritual discipline - composure, restraint, timing, the ability to lose a hand without losing yourself. The metaphor is slyly social, too. Gaming in Quarles’s era carried connotations of vice, risk, and masculine bravado. He appropriates that energy and repurposes it: not to glamorize gambling, but to make resilience feel like a skill, not a sermon.

The subtext is almost modern: you can’t control outcomes, only decisions. Quarles doesn’t promise a win; he promises a way to stay competent under pressure - a theology of grit dressed in the language of the tavern.