Life & Wisdom Quote by John Lyly

A bright, almost taunting piece of moral optics: purity doesn’t bargain with filth. Lyly’s line works because it refuses the anxious logic of “contamination” that dominated late-Elizabethan social thinking, where proximity to vice, poverty, or scandal was assumed to stain the soul. Instead, he flips the direction of influence. The dunghill is real, rank, unavoidable; the sun is equally real, indifferent, and intact. Illumination is not endorsement.

The intent is partly consolatory, partly corrective. It’s consolatory to anyone navigating a court culture built on gossip and guilt-by-association: you can pass over the muck without becoming it. It’s corrective to the pious impulse to retreat from the world in order to stay clean. Lyly suggests that virtue isn’t proven by distance from ugliness but by the capacity to face it without absorption. That’s a demanding standard; it implies a strong internal constitution, not a fragile reputation managed by avoiding “bad company.”

Subtextually, the image also protects art itself. As a writer who trafficked in witty, sometimes worldly drama, Lyly is defending representation: depicting the dunghill is not the same as rolling in it. The sun’s gaze dignifies nothing, excuses nothing, but reveals everything. In a culture nervous about theater’s moral effects, that’s an argument for clarity over squeamishness: the light can touch the worst of us and still remain light.