Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

A blunt memento mori disguised as plain arithmetic: you get one death, not a series of rehearsals. Quarles lands the line with the cold finality of a legal clause, and that’s the point. In a culture saturated with sermons, plague notices, and political violence, death wasn’t an abstract “someday.” It was an appointment that could arrive by contagion, childbirth, sword, or accident, and it often arrived early.

The phrasing borrows the Bible’s cadence (Hebrews 9:27 looms behind it), but Quarles turns doctrine into pressure. “Lot” implies allotment, a portion dealt out by a higher hand. That word quietly kills the modern fantasy that death is negotiable through cleverness, virtue, or status. You don’t bargain; you receive. “But once” sharpens the blade: no reincarnated do-overs, no narrative resets, no second act where you fix the first. It’s spiritual scarcity economics.

As a poet associated with devotional writing in Stuart England, Quarles isn’t trying to depress the reader so much as to discipline them. The subtext is behavioral: if you only die once, you also only get one life in which to make your peace, settle your debts (moral and otherwise), and align yourself with eternity. The line works because it refuses ornament. Its strength is its narrowness - one fact, no exit ramps - and that restraint mirrors the worldview it serves: finite days, infinite stakes.