Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Dryden’s line is a needle slipped under the fingernail of respectable morality: repentance, he implies, often isn’t virtue at all, just impotence. In a single clause he punctures the flattering story people tell about themselves after the appetite has cooled or the opportunity has passed. The sting comes from the reversal. Repentance is supposed to be the triumph of conscience over desire; Dryden recasts it as desire still intact, merely blocked by circumstance, age, fear, or social constraint. It’s not that the sinner has changed. The sinner has been changed by the world.

The subtext is bracingly political as well as psychological. Restoration England was a culture of public piety and private license, a court that could swing from libertine display to moral posturing depending on who held power and what needed to be forgiven. Dryden, who lived through civil war, regicide, and the whiplash of the monarchy’s return, understood how easily moral language becomes a costume: “repentance” can function as reputational management when punishment looms or access disappears. The line suggests that virtue is frequently a luxury of those who can still afford temptation.

What makes it work is its compressed cynicism. “But” doesn’t merely qualify; it exposes. Dryden is less interested in condemning sin than in mocking the self-serving narratives that sanctify surrender. It’s a reminder that moral conversion, when genuine, is rare precisely because it requires power: the power to sin and choose otherwise.