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Daily Inspiration Quote by Aphra Behn

"Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude"

About this Quote

Jealousy, for Behn, isn’t a sudden flare-up; it’s a private infrastructure you build in your own head until it starts living off you. The phrase "secret notions" is the tell. She’s not talking about proof, or even about betrayal. She’s naming the speculative, self-authored storylines that thrive precisely because they’re unshared and unchecked. "In solitude" isn’t just a setting, it’s the accelerant: alone, the mind becomes both prosecutor and witness, and "reason" turns from a tool into a hostage.

As a dramatist in Restoration England, Behn understood how desire, reputation, and surveillance collide. Her stage world is full of masked motives and social games, where people perform virtue while bargaining for power. In that environment, jealousy isn’t merely emotional; it’s political. It polices bodies and loyalty, especially in a culture anxious about women’s sexuality and men’s status. The quote quietly exposes how that policing works: not through public law, but through internalized suspicion.

The brilliance is her coupling of intellect and flesh. Jealousy "troubl[es] our reason" and "consum[es] our health" like a slow fever, suggesting a psychosomatic spiral long before modern psychology gave it names. Behn’s subtext is almost clinical: the real damage comes less from what a rival does than from what the jealous person rehearses in secret. She’s warning that the most corrosive dramas aren’t staged in drawing rooms; they’re staged in the mind, with no curtain call.

Quote Details

TopicAnxiety
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Behn, Aphra. (2026, January 16). Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/nothing-is-more-capable-of-troubling-our-reason-137857/

Chicago Style
Behn, Aphra. "Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/nothing-is-more-capable-of-troubling-our-reason-137857/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/nothing-is-more-capable-of-troubling-our-reason-137857/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

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Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason - Behn
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About the Author

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Aphra Behn (1640 AC - April 16, 1689) was a Dramatist from England.

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