Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Tusser

A moral proverb dressed as a rhyme, Tusser's line lands with the kind of practical menace only a sixteenth-century poet of husbandry could deliver. The sing-song cadence ("quick... slow...") sets a trap: it sounds like folk wisdom you might hum while working, then tightens into a verdict. In a world where formal banking is thin, reputations are currency, and neighbors are your lenders, "credit" isn't a number; it's your standing in the parish. Tusser makes that social fact feel inevitable.

The couplet's real bite is in "go they ever so gay". He’s not just warning against debt; he’s puncturing the performance of prosperity. "Gay" here signals showy, carefree display - the debtor who borrows fast to look fine now, then drags his feet when it's time to settle. Tusser treats that as a kind of fraud of manners: the outward brightness is actually a social IOU, and the community will eventually call it in. The rhyme turns judgment into something easily repeatable, like a slogan that travels faster than the debtor.

Context matters: Tusser wrote for a culture obsessed with order, thrift, and reciprocity, where moral instruction often came packaged as memorable verse. The intent isn't interior psychology; it's behavioral control. Pay promptly or be marked. The subtext is surveillance: your spending, your cheer, your delays are visible. In that economy, "naught" is not poverty alone - it's the collapse of trust, and with it, the collapse of your place among people who keep accounts in memory.