Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Montagu

A kind of emotional judo is happening here: Montagu isn’t promising happiness, she’s designing a fallback system. The line moves in paired substitutions - wise for merry, easy for glad - as if feeling can be rerouted when the preferred channel is blocked. It’s not the cheery optimism of “look on the bright side.” It’s the practiced discipline of someone who knows the bright side is often closed for repairs.

Montagu, a major figure in the Bluestocking circle, is writing from a world where women’s public agency was constrained but their private self-governance was expected to be exemplary. The subtext is strategic: if you can’t change the external conditions, you can still control the internal posture. “Content with what cannot be mended” and “patient when there be no redress” sound almost legalistic, a vocabulary of remedies and appeals. That’s not accidental. She frames disappointment like a case already decided, then shifts the goal from victory to composure.

The intent reads less like confession than self-instruction: a personal ethic calibrated for endurance. It also quietly signals class and intellect. To “endeavor” is to work at character as a project; to be “easy” is to perform steadiness rather than dramatize pain. The sentence’s rhythm reinforces that performance - each clause clicks into place with measured restraint, turning suffering into a sequence of manageable roles. In a culture that prized sensibility but punished women for excess, Montagu offers a socially intelligible way to survive: convert thwarted joy into acceptable virtues, and keep moving.