Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Jonson

Illness, for Jonson, is never just biology; it is a stage where the mind can become its own worst actor. "If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick" lands with the compressed menace of early modern moral psychology: the body may be weakened, but the real danger is the imagination spiraling into panic, self-pity, and obsessive self-surveillance. Jonson isn’t offering a gentle wellness slogan. He’s delivering a hard-edged diagnosis of how quickly inner narration can convert pain into a total identity.

The line’s blunt second-person address matters. "If you be" sounds conditional, almost casual, then snaps into accusation: your sickness is amplified by you. That turn is classic Jonson - the poet of satiric clarity, suspicious of excess and performance, policing the self for theatrical indulgence. In his world, emotions are not sacred truths; they’re habits, often bad ones.

Context sharpens the bite. Jonson lived through recurrent plague outbreaks and a medical culture where "melancholy" and other ailments were understood as mind-body entanglements. Without antibiotics or reliable cures, attention became a kind of currency: to be ill could invite care, but it could also invite moral suspicion. Jonson’s subtext is a warning against luxuriating in debility, against turning suffering into a private drama that steals whatever strength remains.

It also reads like advice to the reader of poems themselves: language can heal or worsen. Feed the wrong thoughts, and you collaborate with the sickness.