Life & Wisdom Quote by Torquato Tasso

Aphorisms like this one don’t flatter the gods so much as indict the living. Tasso’s line lands with a neat ethical inversion: the people most qualified to praise “fortune” are precisely the people whose praise is least trustworthy. If you’re lucky, you can afford to imagine luck as a benevolent system; you can turn contingency into virtue, and accident into reward. The unfortunate don’t “extol fortune” because fortune has given them no narrative they can repeat without sounding like a lie.

The intent is sharply social. Tasso is pointing at the cultural mechanics of gratitude: who gets to speak publicly about how the world works. The fortunate dominate the moral soundscape. Their comfort gives their metaphysics a megaphone, so “fortune” becomes a tasteful synonym for providence, merit, or destiny. The subtext is that praise is not neutral; it’s self-justifying. To extol fortune is to stabilize your own position, to suggest the dice are fair because they rolled your way.

Context matters: Tasso wrote in a late Renaissance Italy saturated with patronage, courts, and precarious careers. A poet’s livelihood often hinged on aristocratic favor - literal “fortune” in the form of protection, payment, and status. Tasso himself knew the cruelty of that system; his life included public success and profound personal instability, including confinement. Read through that biography, the line carries a dry bitterness. It doesn’t romanticize suffering; it exposes how easily the lucky launder their luck into worldview, and how quietly everyone else is asked to applaud.