Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Jonson

Ill fortune, Jonson suggests, is rarely the real destroyer. The killer is the earlier seduction: good fortune that “deceived” you into believing it was permanent, earned, even morally deserved. In that light, bad luck becomes merely the audit. If prosperity didn’t trick you into vanity, entitlement, or fragile expectations, adversity can bruise but not break.

The line works because it flips the usual moral bookkeeping. We’re trained to pity the person flattened by circumstance; Jonson quietly indicts the person who mistook circumstance for character. “Deceived” is the hinge word: fortune isn’t a reward system, it’s a con artist. The truly resilient man isn’t the one who never suffers, but the one who never let luck rewrite his sense of scale.

That cynicism feels especially Jacobean. Jonson lived in a world where patronage could lift a writer one season and abandon him the next; status depended on proximity to power, not pure merit. He also knew reversal personally: imprisonment, scandal, a career negotiated through courts and theaters that could turn hostile overnight. In that environment, emotional self-defense becomes a philosophy: distrust the highs to survive the lows.

There’s an almost Stoic discipline under the epigram’s tightness. Jonson isn’t romanticizing hardship; he’s warning against the psychological softening that success can produce. The subtext lands like a dry toast: enjoy your windfall, but don’t let it teach you the wrong story about yourself.