Life & Wisdom Quote by Lord Byron

Byron frames flexibility not as a polite virtue but as the price of admission to reality. “Opinions are made to be changed” carries the snap of a man impatient with moral posturing and salon certainty; the dash is doing a lot of work, swiveling from command to challenge. It’s not a gentle invitation to “keep an open mind.” It’s closer to: if you treat your views as heirlooms, don’t pretend you’re after truth.

The subtext is Byron’s lifelong contempt for cant - the sanctimonious public voice that claims permanence while hiding self-interest. In Regency Britain, “opinion” wasn’t just personal preference; it was class-coded, political, and reputational. To change your mind could look like weakness or opportunism, especially in a culture where honor and consistency were social currency. Byron flips that stigma. He suggests that the refusal to revise is the real vanity: a commitment to appearing stable rather than being accurate.

The second clause, “or how is truth to be got at?”, turns epistemology into a practical problem. Truth isn’t a trophy handed to the most confident speaker; it’s something you “get at,” like a locked room you circle, testing doors. Byron’s rhetorical question is slyly aggressive: if your opinions never move, you’re not principled - you’re not even searching.

It also reads as self-defense from a poet constantly accused of contradiction: political radical with aristocratic privileges, romantic idol with corrosive irony. Byron implies that contradiction can be evidence of contact with the world as it actually is - messy, changing, resistant to a single pose.