Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Burns

Burns treats language less like decoration than contraband: smuggled lines kept on the person, ready to be flashed like a blade or raised like a shield. “Ready armour” is the key tell. Quotations aren’t passive inspirations; they’re equipment, pre-selected and memorized for deployment. That verb “store” makes the mind a kind of arsenal, and the parenthetical “offensive or defensive” admits a social reality Burns knew intimately: words are how you survive rooms where rank, money, and pedigree do the talking.

The subtext is both practical and sly. A working poet in a class-stratified Scotland, Burns is describing upward mobility by citation. To quote well is to claim membership in a conversation you weren’t born into, to meet authority with authority. It’s also a confession of vulnerability. He doesn’t say he “enjoys” quotations; he needs them “amid the struggle.” The world is “turbulent,” and the turbulence isn’t just private angst. Burns lived through economic precarity, political surveillance in an era jittery about revolution, and the sharp moral policing of rural life. A memorized line becomes a portable ally when institutions fail you.

Why it works is the bracing candor about rhetoric as combat. Many writers sell eloquence as authenticity; Burns admits it’s strategy. The sentence balances violence and dignity: “armour” frames conflict as inevitable, but “favourite” keeps it human, even tender. He’s outlining a survival ethic for the verbally outmatched: collect the best sentences you can, because some days a sentence is the only leverage you have.