Life & Wisdom Quote by William Falconer

Health, here, isn’t just a matter of clean air and calm nerves; it’s moral triage. William Falconer smuggles a whole Enlightenment worldview into a sentence that pretends to be practical advice: the “way of life” (read: quieter, more rural, more self-contained) doesn’t merely strengthen the body. It reduces the opportunities to be corrupted. In Falconer’s hands, vice isn’t an inner demon you wrestle nobly; it’s a social weather system. Step out of the crowd and you step out of the storm.

The phrasing is doing sly work. “Nor is it the least advantage” is a prim, almost bureaucratic understatement that lets him sound reasonable while delivering a loaded claim: crowded society is essentially a vice engine. “Expose” suggests contamination, as if urban life is a kind of moral miasma - a period-appropriate anxiety when cities were swelling, disease was poorly understood, and the boundary between physical illness and moral decay felt porous. He’s writing in an era that loved to link temperament, environment, and virtue; what looks like etiquette is also public health policy.

The subtext is less anti-people than anti-friction. Crowds mean spectacle, commerce, alcohol, sex, gossip, debt - not because humans are worse in cities, but because density multiplies impulse. Falconer’s intent isn’t to sermonize so much as to reframe virtue as infrastructure: arrange life so temptation has fewer points of entry, and you can call it “health” with a straight face.