Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Sidney

Sidney gives “wit” a job description that’s bigger than clever talk: it’s an instrument we build, then use to measure the world against an imagined better one. “Erected” is the tell. Wit here isn’t a natural sparkle you’re born with; it’s raised up, trained, disciplined - constructed like a fortification or a monument. That choice of verb folds his soldierly life into his literary one: the mind, like an army, can be drilled into readiness. The line flatters human agency while quietly warning that without cultivation, we remain stuck with whatever reality hands us.

The sentence also smuggles in a Renaissance confidence bordering on provocation. To “know what perfection is” suggests we can conceive ideals that exceed the messy facts of politics, bodies, and history. That’s the core of Sidney’s larger project in The Defence of Poesy: arguing that art doesn’t just entertain; it tutors desire. Poetry (and by extension, wit) sketches models of virtue so compelling that people might actually attempt them. The subtext is aspirational and a little anxious: if you can imagine perfection, you’re now responsible for recognizing your own shortfall.

Context matters. Writing in an England riven by religious pressure, courtly intrigue, and imperial ambition, Sidney positions imagination as both moral technology and civic tool. His “wit” doesn’t escape the world; it equips you to judge it - and, implicitly, to change it.