Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

This sentiment is associated with Abraham Cowley’s late-life reflections on retirement and withdrawal from public affairs after the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Cowley, who had been involved with the royalist cause and diplomatic/intelligence work in exile, later sought a quieter life devoted to study and writing. In that setting, “solitude” is not romanticized as automatically ennobling; it is presented as a demanding discipline. The remark fits the Restoration-era debate about the merits and dangers of retreat: only those who have first experienced society (and can judge its “foolishness”) and who possess moral steadiness can turn solitude into something fruitful rather than merely idle or self-indulgent.

Cowley argues that solitude is not automatically ennobling. Used “well,” it requires two hard-won qualities: worldly knowledge and virtue. Without experience of society, a solitary person may simply be naïve, mistaking ignorance for wisdom; without virtue, retreat becomes self-indulgence, misanthropy, or escapism. The line draws a sharp distinction between principled retirement and mere withdrawal. Its moral psychology is Augustan in spirit: the world is full of “vanity,” and only a disciplined mind can despise it without becoming bitter or deluded. Solitude, then, is presented as an achievement—an ethical stance earned through engagement, not a refuge for the untested.