Life & Wisdom Quote by John Gay

A bloody nose is doing a lot of moral work here. John Gay turns a folk warning into something sharper than a proverb: step between two combatants and you become a target. The line’s genius is its blunt physicality. No lofty talk of peace-making or civic duty, just the bodily cost of playing mediator when tempers are hot and loyalties are tribal. It’s a couplet that understands a social truth modern etiquette still struggles with: conflict isn’t a puzzle to be solved by the nearest reasonable person; it’s often a performance of power, pride, and grievance, and outsiders make convenient props.

Gay wrote in an England where politeness and violence coexisted in the same room. Coffeehouse sociability, partisan politics, dueling culture, street brawls, and the rough-and-tumble of class life all formed the backdrop. In that world, “interpose” doesn’t mean offering a thoughtful perspective; it means physically inserting yourself into a volatile scene. The caution is practical, but the subtext is psychological: the peacemaker threatens both sides. Each party can read mediation as betrayal, or as an attempt to claim moral superiority. So the mediator absorbs redirected aggression, the way a referee gets blamed by both teams.

There’s also a dry cynicism in “must often.” Gay isn’t saying you’ll always get hurt; he’s saying the odds are high enough that the virtuous impulse starts to look like poor risk management. The couplet flatters no one. It doesn’t romanticize harmony; it diagnoses how violence recruits bystanders.