Wit & Attitude Quote by Abraham Cowley

Solitude, Cowley suggests, is not a spa treatment; its real use is almost aristocratically demanding. The line opens with a kind of gatekeeping that feels less elitist than diagnostic: most people bring the world into the room with them. Without the right equipment, being alone just amplifies anxieties, appetites, and self-mythology. Cowley’s “very few” is a warning against the fashionable retreat, the pastoral fantasy that isolation automatically produces clarity.

The subtext hinges on a paradox. To “use” solitude well, you need “a knowledge of the world” - the very thing solitude seems to renounce. Cowley isn’t praising ignorance or withdrawal; he’s arguing that retreat only matters after you’ve taken the world’s measure. Experience supplies the comparison point: you can’t see “the foolishness of it” unless you’ve been tempted by its rewards, its noise, its public games. Solitude becomes less an escape than a verdict.

Then comes the harder condition: “enough virtue to despise all the vanity.” Cowley draws a bright line between disappointment and renunciation. Plenty of people dislike society because it wounds them; fewer can reject it because they see through it. “Despise” is severe, moralized, and deliberately unfriendly to self-pity. Vanity isn’t only other people’s craving for applause; it’s the ego’s need to stay in the plot. Cowley’s ideal solitary is someone who can step out of that narrative without turning solitude into another performance.

Context matters: a 17th-century poet writing in an age of courtly ambition and political upheaval knew how seductive public life could be, and how quickly it curdled. His solitude isn’t romantic; it’s a discipline reserved for those who’ve already survived the crowd.