Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

Wisdom, Quarles insists, isn’t a windfall you blow in one night. It’s an asset that keeps compounding. The line turns “getting” into a kind of acquisitive verb - almost mercantile - then snaps it into a second claim: once acquired, wisdom “retains.” Not you retain it; it retains. That grammatical tilt is the trick. Wisdom becomes an active force, a steady hand on the ledger, holding what life usually steals: clarity, proportion, self-command.

Quarles writes from a 17th-century England obsessed with instability - religious upheaval, political fracture, a culture that watched fortunes and reputations vanish overnight. In that environment, the promise of something that can’t be easily confiscated is more than pious comfort; it’s a survival strategy. The couplet-like compression echoes devotional poetry’s habit of making moral counsel feel like a proverb you can carry in your pocket.

The subtext is gently combative. Quarles is pushing back against the seductive idea that knowledge is just accumulation, that you’re “smart” because you’ve collected facts, status, or rhetorical polish. Those things leak. Wisdom, in his framing, is closer to trained perception: the ability to keep what matters when conditions turn hostile. There’s also a Calvinist-adjacent undertone: true wisdom is not merely human cleverness but a grace-inflected habit of mind, durable because it’s anchored beyond circumstance.

It works because it flatters without indulging. The line offers a bracing bargain: pay the cost of learning rightly, and you gain something that, unlike money or youth, won’t betray you at the first hard season.