"It is the fortunate who should extol fortune"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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