Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

“Put off thy cares with thy clothes” lands like a small act of rebellion against the Puritan work-ethic caricature people lazily project onto the 1600s. Quarles, a devotional poet writing in the thick of English religious conflict and social anxiety, isn’t praising idleness; he’s prescribing a discipline of relief. The line treats worry as something you can unfasten, like buttons, at the threshold of sleep. That tactile image matters: it makes an inward, abstract burden feel manageable through an outward ritual. You don’t conquer care by thinking harder. You change posture, environment, habit.

The second half turns rest and labor into a reciprocal economy: “rest strengthen thy labor, and… labor sweeten thy rest.” It’s an early modern version of balance, but with a moral edge. Rest isn’t a guilty indulgence; it’s an instrument, sharpening the next day’s work. Work, in turn, is redeemed by the promise of earned repose. The subtext is pastoral and pragmatic: if you can’t stop working, at least stop grinding yourself into dust.

Quarles’s diction (“thy”) invokes scripture without quoting it, borrowing the authority of sacred cadence to normalize a human need. In a period when plague, war, and political instability made “care” a constant companion, the counsel reads less like quaint piety and more like survival technique: protect sleep, not as escape, but as stewardship of the self.