Wit & Attitude Quote by John Dryden

Dryden’s couplet behaves like a trapdoor: you think you’re getting a tidy moral, and then it flips the hierarchy that morals usually protect. Love, in his telling, doesn’t reward intelligence or punish stupidity in any stable way. It “enlightens” the fool and “blinds” the wise, not because love is mystical, but because it’s socially and psychologically asymmetric. The so-called fool gets permission to feel without overthinking; love becomes clarity precisely because it cuts through self-consciousness. The “wise,” meanwhile, has more to lose: reputation, judgment, the pride of being correct. Love doesn’t just distract him; it humiliates his best tools by making them irrelevant.

The line also carries Restoration-era bite. Dryden writes in a culture newly re-obsessed with courtly performance, where wit is currency and romantic intrigue is both sport and scandal. In that world, “wisdom” often means strategic restraint, an ability to see motives, manage appearances, control desire. Love’s “blindness” is not innocent; it’s political. To fall in love is to become legible, manipulable, suddenly out of step with the cool, transactional etiquette of power. The fool’s enlightenment is equally sharp: if you’re already dismissed as a simpleton, love can’t damage your status the way it damages the wise. It can only give you something you were denied - intensity, purpose, a narrative.

Dryden’s intent isn’t sentimental. It’s diagnostic: love is an equalizer that punishes self-mastery and rewards the unguarded, turning social rank into a punchline.