Life & Wisdom Quote by Annie Dillard

Courage, Dillard reminds us, isn’t a lab experiment with safety goggles and a clipboard. The line is deceptively plain, almost folksy, but it contains a dare: if you insist on controlling the conditions, you’re not measuring bravery so much as rehearsing comfort. “Test” smuggles in the modern fantasy that every human trait can be verified, optimized, and repeated. “Cautiously” punctures that fantasy with a single adverb, exposing how our risk-management instincts can become a moral alibi.

The sentence works because it’s built on friction. “Test” implies method, distance, and proof; “courage” implies immediacy, stakes, and the possibility of loss. Put them together and you get the kind of contradiction Dillard loves: the spiritual and the practical colliding in a tight, quotable package. It’s also a critique of performative bravery, the sort that wants applause without jeopardy. If the outcome is guaranteed, it’s not courage; it’s branding.

Contextually, Dillard’s writing often circles attention, faith, nature, and the ways we negotiate fear while trying to live awake. This line could sit comfortably beside her broader suspicion of half-lived experience: we try to sample intensity in controlled doses, to “try on” danger without letting it change us. The subtext is blunt: courage isn’t a trait you claim, it’s a cost you pay.