Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard Meltzer

Friendship, Meltzer suggests, isn’t built on ignorance; it’s built on accurate perception and a decision to stay anyway. The joke lands because it flips the usual compliment. You’re not a “perfect egg,” gleaming and unblemished. You’re “slightly cracked” - flawed in the small, familiar ways that show up in real life: the bad habit, the sharp edge in a bad mood, the mistake you keep making after you promised you wouldn’t. The friend isn’t a gullible cheerleader. He sees the crack. He just refuses to treat it as the whole story.

The “good egg” idiom carries a cozy, everyday moral vocabulary: decency, reliability, basic human worth. Meltzer pairs it with a lightly comic image of damage, which smuggles in a tougher claim about intimacy. Real friends aren’t doing PR for you; they’re doing triage. They know the evidence against you and still argue, quietly, for your better character - not in court, but in the daily jury of other people’s opinions and your own self-contempt.

Coming from a lawyer, the subtext sharpens. Lawyers live amid competing narratives and unflattering facts. Meltzer’s line reads like a verdict delivered with a wink: yes, there are exhibits A through F, and yes, you’re still essentially decent. It’s affectionate cynicism, the kind that assumes everyone is a little broken and treats loyalty as a mature choice rather than a naive belief.