Daily Inspiration Quote by David Seabury

Seabury is rescuing “unselfishness” from its favorite cultural abuse: the idea that goodness equals compliance. By pairing the virtue with “wise,” he treats selflessness not as a personality trait but as a discipline of judgment. The phrase “not a surrender of yourself to the wishes of anyone” sounds like a clinical correction delivered to people trained into reflexive pleasing - the spouse who disappears into a partner’s moods, the employee whose boundaries dissolve under “team player” rhetoric, the civic-minded citizen bullied by louder voices. Seabury’s target isn’t generosity; it’s capitulation masquerading as morality.

The pivot is his real provocation: your obligation is “only to the best discoverable course of action.” That “discoverable” matters. It rejects moral certainty and halo-polishing. You don’t get to claim purity because you gave in; you’re responsible for doing the harder work of figuring out what actually helps. In a mid-century psychological register, it’s an early argument for agency: mental health as the capacity to choose, not merely to endure.

The subtext is almost political in its suspicion of “wishes.” Wishes are loud, immediate, and often self-serving. “Course of action” is colder language - pragmatic, consequence-minded, ethically adult. Seabury is offering permission to disappoint people, even to look “selfish,” when the smarter, more humane outcome demands it. Unselfishness, in this framing, isn’t self-erasure. It’s self-possession deployed in service of reality.