Wit & Attitude Quote by Abraham Cowley

Cowley’s line is a small masterpiece of social positioning: a prayer not for greatness, but for the exact altitude where other people’s feelings can’t reach you. “Means” sounds like money, but it also carries the older sense of one’s condition in life, the whole package of status, safety, and public visibility. He asks to live “too low for envy” because envy is the tax success pays in a culture obsessed with comparison. Be high enough and you become a target, a walking insult to everyone still climbing.

Then comes the sharper twist: “for contempt too high.” Poverty isn’t romantic here; it’s humiliating. Cowley wants a life above the threshold where others can dismiss him as insignificant, useless, or ridiculous. The couplet sketches a narrow band of autonomy: modest comfort, minimal spectacle, maximum peace.

The subtext is both wary and worldly. Cowley isn’t pretending virtue floats above reputation; he’s admitting that public emotions have consequences. Envy can curdle into sabotage, gossip, or political danger; contempt can become exclusion and indignity. That realism makes the line feel modern, like an early map of what we’d now call social optics.

Context matters: Cowley lived through England’s civil wars, regime change, and the nervous surveillance of allegiance. In a world where being prominent could be fatal and being poor could be degrading, “lying low” becomes strategy, not resignation. The sentence’s balanced geometry mirrors its ideal: a life calibrated to dodge the worst of other people.