Life & Wisdom Quote by William Dunbar

Pleasure, Dunbar warns, is not just fragile; it’s compromised. “Our pleasance here is all vain glory” makes delight sound like a brag in disguise, a performance of status rather than a private experience. The word “our” is doing quiet damage: it indicts a whole social order, the courtly culture Dunbar knew intimately, where refinement and celebration doubled as proof of belonging. In that setting, “pleasance” isn’t innocent; it’s a currency. Calling it “vain glory” punctures the ceremony with a moral pin.

Then comes the harder turn: “This false world is but transitory.” Dunbar doesn’t merely say life is short; he calls the world “false,” as if the problem isn’t mortality alone but the seductive illusion that anything here can be made to last. Transience becomes an accusation. The line compresses a late-medieval Christian sensibility into two beats: the world as glittering decoy, time as the force that reveals the trick. It’s memento mori stripped of comforting softness.

Context sharpens the intent. Dunbar wrote in a Scotland marked by political uncertainty, plague memory, and the unstable economics of patronage; poets survived by pleasing powerful people while privately knowing how quickly favor curdles. The couplet reads like spiritual counsel and workplace realism at once: today’s applause is tomorrow’s silence. Its power lies in the double address - to the soul and to the court - making vanity not a personal flaw but a system, and impermanence not an abstract truth but a daily threat.