Life & Wisdom Quote by Abraham Cowley

Hope is framed here less as a virtue than as a bargain-bin medicine: available to everyone, priced at nothing, and therefore suspiciously easy to prescribe. Cowley’s sting is in the adjectives. “Cheap” and “universal” are usually compliments in public health; in poetry, they’re often code for “blunt instrument.” The line treats hope as the one treatment that survives when every other remedy fails - not because it reliably heals, but because it’s endlessly renewable. You can run out of money, friends, and strength. You don’t run out of hope; you just keep minting it.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, hope is mercy: when “ills” pile up, it’s a psychological anesthetic that keeps people moving through pain. On the other, it’s a coping mechanism that can slide into complacency. If hope is the “cure,” why demand actual cures - political reform, material help, justice - that cost someone something? Calling it “universal” hints at its role as social glue: it keeps societies functional by making suffering feel survivable, even when conditions don’t change.

Context matters. Cowley wrote through civil war, regicide, exile, and restoration - a century where “endure” wasn’t metaphor. In that churn, hope becomes both survival technology and a quiet indictment of a world so broken that the most reliable relief is an emotion. The line works because it flatters and chastises at once: it honors human resilience while warning that resilience can be exploited.