Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas More

A line like this works because it’s a self-portrait painted with deliberate insult to the painter. Thomas More, the high-performing humanist who made his name on learning, stages a miniature anti-intellectual confession: he claims his “only books” were “woman’s looks,” and the curriculum was “folly.” The phrasing makes the joke sting. “Books” suggests discipline, study, mastery; replacing them with “looks” turns scholarship into gawking, courtship, appetite. It’s a pun that demotes the life of the mind into the life of the eye.

The intent is less diary entry than rhetorical maneuver. More is writing in a Renaissance world where men performed modesty as a kind of social armor; even dazzling minds were expected to kneel before their betters, their readers, or God. By framing himself as a fool schooled by beauty, he deploys self-deprecation to appear harmless, witty, and appropriately humble. Subtext: don’t mistake my playfulness for emptiness. Only someone steeped in letters can afford to “confess” to having none.

The context matters: More’s circle was saturated with Erasmus-style satire, where “folly” is both punchline and critique. Calling himself taught by folly winks at that tradition while also gesturing at moral seriousness. In More’s era, desire was frequently narrated as distraction from virtue; he borrows that moral language to signal self-control by describing its opposite. The line flatters women’s power, admits male vulnerability, and keeps the speaker’s authority intact by turning weakness into style.