Daily Inspiration Quote by John Churton Collins

Collins is needling the lazy confidence that passes for intelligence. "A wise man thinks what is easy is difficult" reads like a paradox, but its real target is the smug person who mistakes fluency for mastery. Wisdom, in his framing, isn’t a stockpile of answers; it’s a disciplined suspicion of anything that looks effortless. The wise man doesn’t fetishize complexity for its own sake. He simply knows how often "easy" is a trick of perspective: the shortcut that skips consequences, the elegant argument that hides a weak premise, the moral certainty that collapses under one inconvenient fact.

As a critic, Collins is also defending his trade. Criticism is the unpopular job of turning the apparently simple into something that must be accounted for: why a line works, what a style smuggles in, how a sentiment flatters its audience. In late-Victorian intellectual life, where "common sense" and self-assured moralizing were cultural currencies, this is a small act of resistance. He’s saying: beware the obvious, especially when it arrives with applause.

The subtext has an ethical edge. Treating easy things as difficult is a form of respect: for craft, for truth, for other people’s experience. It’s also self-protection against the most reliable human error - overconfidence. Collins makes wisdom sound less like brilliance than like carefulness: a mindset that slows down precisely when everyone else is eager to declare it settled.