Education Quote by John Dryden

Dryden turns self-improvement into a daily athletic event: if you are not climbing over a fear every day, you have not even enrolled in life. The line is bluntly disciplinary, and that severity is the point. As a Restoration poet writing after civil war, regicide, plague, and fire, Dryden came up in a culture where stability felt provisional and public allegiance could turn lethal. In that atmosphere, fear is not a private quirk; its a political weather system. His maxim reads like a survival ethic dressed up as moral philosophy.

The specific intent is to demote comfort from virtue to vice. Dryden frames fear as the baseline condition of being alive, then makes courage not a grand, occasional heroism but a routine practice. The trick is the word "surmount": not "erase" or "deny". Fear remains, but it must be stepped over, like a threshold you cross to keep moving. That nuance keeps the statement from becoming macho posturing; its closer to apprenticeship than conquest.

Subtextually, Dryden is policing the imagination. Poets traffic in doubt, longing, and anxiety; the line quietly insists that art and character alike require friction. If you let fear set the schedule, your life becomes reactive, your beliefs pliable, your talents safely unused. The daily cadence is the sharpest pressure point: courage is not an identity you claim, its a habit you either keep or lose.