Daily Inspiration Quote by Aphra Behn

“Perfect tranquillity” is a promise and a provocation. Aphra Behn isn’t selling a scented-candle fantasy of solitude; she’s sketching an architecture of survival for a mind under siege. The line works because it’s so exacting: tranquillity is “nowhere to be found but” in three things, and each is a gatekeeping clause. Retreat alone can slide into isolation, a faithful friend alone can become social obligation, a good library alone can harden into sterile cleverness. Behn’s triad argues that peace is engineered, not stumbled into.

The subtext is especially pointed coming from a Restoration dramatist, a woman who made her name in a public sphere that routinely punished women for being public. “Retreat” reads as refuge from spectacle and judgment; “a faithful friend” is not a crowd, not a salon, not the fickle applause of the theater, but one vetted witness who keeps you tethered to the world without surrendering you to it. Then the “good library” lands as both consolation and quiet rebellion: in an era when women’s access to education was constrained, books become a portable sovereignty, a place where you can accumulate power privately.

The phrase “nowhere to be found” also carries a hard-earned pessimism. Society won’t grant you tranquillity; institutions won’t curate it. You construct it by choosing your distance, your intimacies, and your inputs. In Behn’s hands, retreat isn’t defeat. It’s strategy.