Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Fashion is the original attention economy, and Mary Astell is already sick of it. In that single sentence, she sketches a moral psychology of trend-chasing: what lacks "real excellency and value in it self" can only hold us while the "giddy Humour" lasts. The phrasing matters. "Entertains" doesn’t mean delights in the modern, harmless sense; it suggests a mind temporarily occupied, diverted, kept from steadier thought. Astell treats distraction as a symptom of weak standards, not a neutral preference.

Her real target isn’t just silly amusements. It’s an entire social order that trains people - especially women, in her context - to prize the ornamental over the durable, the performative over the substantial. "Giddy Humour" carries a double insult: fickle and slightly dizzy, the mind as a spinning compass needle. She’s diagnosing how taste gets socially engineered, how we borrow our enthusiasms from the room and then confuse that borrowed heat for genuine worth.

Set in late 17th- and early 18th-century England, Astell was writing into a culture obsessed with manners, novelty, and status display, while also arguing for women’s education and rational autonomy. The line quietly advances that political project: if you want a life not governed by other people’s whims, you need an internal metric of value. It’s a warning and a dare - build a self that can outlast the mood.