Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

A friendship launched as a transaction is already a countdown. Quarles compresses that cold realism into a single, elegant trap: the phrase "to the end" appears twice, but it means two different things. The first is the hoped-for finish line - lifelong loyalty. The second is the motive - an "end" as in an objective, a payoff. By folding the same word back on itself, he exposes how easily we dress self-interest in the language of intimacy.

Quarles is writing from a 17th-century moral imagination shaped by Protestant suspicion of vanity and worldly calculation. In that world, motives matter as much as acts. The line reads like a proverb, but it behaves like an indictment: if the origin is instrumental, the relationship will stay instrumental, no matter how warmly it performs. The syntax even stages the disappointment. "Will not continue" arrives early, shutting the door before the sentence has fully opened, as if the failure is baked in from the first handshake.

The subtext is less about cynicism than about spiritual accounting. Friendship, for Quarles, belongs to the realm of constancy and grace - gifts that can't be earned or leveraged. Begin it "for an end" and you turn a person into a means, and means always get discarded when the goal changes. The line still lands because it names a dynamic modern life loves to normalize: networking masquerading as connection, alliances that survive only while they're useful. Quarles's warning is simple and severe: motives are destiny.