Daily Inspiration Quote by John Webster

Lust, Webster insists, can dress itself up in any costume and still give itself away by the kind of intelligence it performs. The line pivots on a mean little distinction: witty, never wise. Wit is speed, sparkle, verbal cunning - the talent for improvising excuses and turning shame into a joke. Wisdom is slower and costlier: judgment, foresight, an ability to live with consequences. By granting lust wit, Webster isn’t moralizing from a distance; he’s acknowledging its seductions. Desire doesn’t just overpower. It persuades. It recruits language, style, and social theater to make itself look like something else: romance, destiny, even virtue. That’s what "masque" is doing here, pulling in the Jacobean taste for court masques and elaborate disguises while hinting at something more sinister: a culture where surfaces are tools and concealment is a form of power.

The subtext is theatrical and forensic at once. Lust is "oft found" witty because it thrives in public performance - in banter, in flirtation, in self-mythology. It can read a room, mirror an audience, manufacture plausibility. But it is "never wise" because it narrows the future to the next gratification; it turns other people into props; it mistakes cleverness for truth. In Webster’s tragedy-soaked world - where appetites and ambition share the same bloodstream - the line doubles as a warning about courts and cities: regimes of spectacle can be brilliant without being sane. Disguise isn’t an exception; it’s the operating system.