"All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest"
About this Quote
Richardson’s line lands like a quiet pin in the balloon of self-regard: excellence isn’t a crown you wear, it’s a ranking you temporarily occupy. The sting comes from the symmetry. You “fancy” yourself above “the meanest,” but the sentence turns the same measuring stick back on you, suggesting someone else can look down on you with identical confidence. It’s a social x-ray: what we call merit is often just perspective plus proximity.
As a novelist of manners, Richardson understood that status is a narrative people tell themselves. “Comparative” does more than qualify excellence; it demotes it. Achievement becomes relational, dependent on who’s in the room, who’s counting, and what qualities are being tallied. The subtext is moral as much as social: pride is basically bad arithmetic. You can’t use superiority to justify contempt when the very logic of comparison guarantees your own smallness somewhere else.
The context matters. In 18th-century Britain, with its rigid hierarchies and emerging middle-class ambition, “excellence” was both a personal aspiration and a social weapon. Richardson’s fiction tracks how reputations are made, policed, and destroyed; this aphorism reads like a portable antidote to the era’s status fever. It doesn’t argue against excellence, exactly. It argues against the idea that excellence authorizes cruelty. The cleverness is its refusal to preach: it simply forces the reader to imagine the unseen observer who finds you just as “mean” as you find others.
As a novelist of manners, Richardson understood that status is a narrative people tell themselves. “Comparative” does more than qualify excellence; it demotes it. Achievement becomes relational, dependent on who’s in the room, who’s counting, and what qualities are being tallied. The subtext is moral as much as social: pride is basically bad arithmetic. You can’t use superiority to justify contempt when the very logic of comparison guarantees your own smallness somewhere else.
The context matters. In 18th-century Britain, with its rigid hierarchies and emerging middle-class ambition, “excellence” was both a personal aspiration and a social weapon. Richardson’s fiction tracks how reputations are made, policed, and destroyed; this aphorism reads like a portable antidote to the era’s status fever. It doesn’t argue against excellence, exactly. It argues against the idea that excellence authorizes cruelty. The cleverness is its refusal to preach: it simply forces the reader to imagine the unseen observer who finds you just as “mean” as you find others.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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