Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Dyer

A proverb about “nice guys” is usually a complaint disguised as wisdom: be decent and you’ll get punished for it. Edward Dyer tweaks that familiar self-pity into something cooler and more pointed. By shifting from “nice” to “great,” he refuses the binary where kindness equals weakness and ambition equals cruelty. The line doesn’t deny that the world often rewards the loud, the ruthless, the strategically indifferent. It simply suggests there’s a rank beyond winning that isn’t measured by arriving first.

The mechanics matter. “Finish last” is a cliché that carries the sting of social Darwinism; “come in right after them” is a sly revision that keeps the race metaphor but changes the moral math. Greatness isn’t pictured as domination. It’s adjacent to decency, almost in its shadow, arriving with a small delay that reads less like failure than like principle. The joke lands because it’s tight: it concedes the cynic’s premise (nice doesn’t always pay) while undermining the cynic’s conclusion (so stop being nice).

Dyer, a Renaissance poet and courtier, wrote in a culture where “advancement” depended on favor, intrigue, and performance. In that world, being “nice” could be politically naive; being “great” required a subtler blend of virtue and nerve. The subtext is a gentle rebuke to the opportunist: you might beat the good, but you haven’t proven you’re better. It also reassures the decent striver: integrity may not win the sprint, but it can still place.