Life & Wisdom Quote by Matthew Green

Pleasure splashes alongside duty here, but it never gets to steer. Green gives you a bright, almost cinematic distraction - dolphins cutting the water, nature performing its effortless charm - then snaps the gaze back to navigation: compass, course, "my way". The line works because it stages temptation and refusal in the same breath. "Though" is the hinge: a polite concession that hides a harder discipline. Yes, beauty exists. No, it won't derail me.

Green wrote in an early 18th-century culture that prized restraint, measure, and the performance of good sense. The poem-era moral imagination loved a tidy emblem: the sea as life, the compass as conscience or reason, the journey as character. But Green isn't preaching in a thunderous key. The phrasing is calm, almost conversational, which makes the self-command feel practiced rather than pious. The pleasure isn't demonized; it's acknowledged as real, even welcome. The subtext is less "enjoyment is bad" than "enjoyment is not the point."

There's also an undercurrent of modern self-management avant la lettre: attention as a scarce resource, distraction as a constant feature of the world, identity defined by the ability to keep moving. "My compass" is tellingly possessive. This isn't obedience to an external map; it's an inward instrument, a private calibration. Green lets the dolphins have their moment, then reminds you that watching is not living. The sea offers spectacle; the speaker chooses direction.