Daily Inspiration Quote by Lincoln Steffens

Art, for Steffens, isn’t the engine of civilization; it’s the bright trim that makes the long march bearable, even legible. Calling art a “border of flowers” is a deliberately modest metaphor from a muckraking journalist famous for describing America’s civic rot in unsentimental detail. He’s not romanticizing painters and poets as saviors. He’s positioning art as a public-facing ornament along “the course” of progress: visible, cultivated, and telling, but not necessarily steering the river.

That choice of imagery carries subtext. A border is planned. Someone decides what gets planted, what counts as beauty, what’s weeds. So the line flatters art while quietly implicating power: the aesthetic record of a society is often curated by the people who own the garden. At the same time, flowers are living things. They can’t be faked forever. Even ornamental art becomes a diagnostic tool, revealing what a civilization has the leisure, anxiety, or ambition to celebrate.

The context matters. Steffens worked in the Progressive Era, when industrial wealth, urban corruption, and reform politics collided. His writing treated “civilization” as a project under construction, prone to hypocrisy. In that world, art functions as the softer infrastructure of modern life: a civic signal of refinement, a morale booster, sometimes a distraction from the mess behind the hedges. The quote lands because it’s both affectionate and skeptical, offering art as evidence of advancement while hinting it may also be a cover story.