Life & Wisdom Quote by Ludovico Ariosto

Self-deception doesn’t arrive as a thunderclap; it slips in wearing the costume of preference. Ariosto’s line is blunt about the mechanics: belief is often less a conclusion than a convenience. “Soon” matters as much as “believe.” He’s not describing a slow philosophical conversion but the quick, almost lazy way the mind falls into alignment with what it already wants. The phrase “the things we would believe” makes desire the engine and “believe” the destination, turning conviction into a kind of emotional autopilot.

As a Renaissance poet steeped in courtly life and the churning politics of patronage, Ariosto knew how narratives get manufactured - not only by rulers and lovers, but by ordinary people trying to keep their worlds coherent. The subtext is quietly ruthless: rationality is a late-stage justification, not the origin story. We audition facts the way we audition characters in a romance epic, rewarding the ones that flatter our fears, cravings, and loyalties.

The intent isn’t to sneer at human weakness so much as to expose it with poet’s economy. Ariosto’s epics are full of enchanted detours, mistaken identities, and characters led by obsession; this line distills that larger comedy of misrecognition into a psychological axiom. It works because it’s symmetrical and self-sealing: the sentence performs what it condemns, almost inviting the reader to notice their own “would” - the private wish that’s already reshaping reality. In an age of propaganda-by-algorithm, its bite feels newly contemporary: the mind doesn’t just accept a story; it selects one, then calls it truth.