Life & Wisdom Quote by John Gay

A farewell that refuses finality, John Gay's compact line promises that separation is not an end but a passage. The sentiment works by flipping the emotional valence of parting: absence becomes the preface to presence, delay becomes anticipation. Its balance of opposites is strikingly simple, almost proverbial, and that simplicity is the source of its power. By naming reunion as the destination baked into every goodbye, the line offers a soft discipline for the heart, turning grief into patience and worry into watchfulness. It does not deny loss; it reframes it as interval.

Gay, an early 18th-century poet and playwright best known for The Beggar's Opera, excelled at distilling large feelings into songlike phrases that ordinary people could carry with them. His world was full of departures: sailors and soldiers shipping out, servants changing posts, lovers negotiating the geography of work and class. In ballads such as Black-eyed Susan and in the theatrical farewells he wrote for the stage, he tapped the cadence of common speech and the consolations of shared belief. The line resonates with that milieu, offering secular comfort while quietly echoing a Christian culture in which dying itself could be imagined as a journey to a future meeting. No wonder it found long life on farewell notes and gravestones.

There is also craft here. The six-beat cadence is almost a lullaby: we only part to meet again. The phrase begins with community, we, and hurries past the pain, part, to land on the promise, meet again. That progression models emotional movement: acknowledge the break, sustain the bond, picture the return. As advice it is gentle rather than grand, meant less to argue than to steady. Centuries later it still does the humble work Gay intended, giving those who must separate a way to keep faith until the door opens once more.