"To give reason for fancy were to weigh the fire, and measure the wind"
About this Quote
Trying to justify desire with logic, Lyly suggests, is as futile as putting a hearth-flame on a scale or running a ruler along a gust. The line works because it flatters imagination while quietly mocking the era's hunger for tidy explanation. Fancy here isn't just a whimsical thought; in Elizabethan usage it hovers between love, caprice, and the mind's talent for self-enchantment. Reason is the courtly virtue, the thing you perform in public; fancy is the private weather that refuses to behave.
Lyly, a stylist who helped popularize euphuism (that high-polish prose packed with balance, antithesis, and rhetorical sparkle), builds a miniature argument out of two physical impossibilities. "Weigh" and "measure" are the verbs of merchants, scientists, administrators - the rising early-modern faith that the world can be quantified. Fire and wind are the counterexamples that make that faith look slightly ridiculous. They exist, they move things, they change outcomes, but they don't submit to the instruments that certify knowledge.
The subtext is social as much as psychological. In court culture, where love, patronage, and advancement all depended on performance, demanding "reasons" for attraction or inspiration could be a trap: an invitation to overexplain, expose yourself, or reduce a living impulse into safe, rhetorical currency. Lyly's sentence protects fancy by declaring it un-auditable. It also licenses art itself: the writer's right to move you without filing a ledger of proofs.
Lyly, a stylist who helped popularize euphuism (that high-polish prose packed with balance, antithesis, and rhetorical sparkle), builds a miniature argument out of two physical impossibilities. "Weigh" and "measure" are the verbs of merchants, scientists, administrators - the rising early-modern faith that the world can be quantified. Fire and wind are the counterexamples that make that faith look slightly ridiculous. They exist, they move things, they change outcomes, but they don't submit to the instruments that certify knowledge.
The subtext is social as much as psychological. In court culture, where love, patronage, and advancement all depended on performance, demanding "reasons" for attraction or inspiration could be a trap: an invitation to overexplain, expose yourself, or reduce a living impulse into safe, rhetorical currency. Lyly's sentence protects fancy by declaring it un-auditable. It also licenses art itself: the writer's right to move you without filing a ledger of proofs.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Lyly, John. (2026, January 15). To give reason for fancy were to weigh the fire, and measure the wind. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-give-reason-for-fancy-were-to-weigh-the-fire-67418/
Chicago Style
Lyly, John. "To give reason for fancy were to weigh the fire, and measure the wind." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-give-reason-for-fancy-were-to-weigh-the-fire-67418/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"To give reason for fancy were to weigh the fire, and measure the wind." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-give-reason-for-fancy-were-to-weigh-the-fire-67418/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.
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