Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard Meltzer

A lawyer blessing both givers and takers sounds, at first blush, like a tidy Hallmark beat. It isnt. Bernard Meltzer is sneaking an ethic of accountability into the soft robes of a beatitude, borrowing the cadence of scripture to smuggle in something closer to contract law: obligations may be invisible, but they are still real.

The first half - "give without remembering" - aims at purity of motive. Keep a ledger of your generosity and it stops being generosity; it becomes leverage. Meltzers phrasing targets the social power hidden in favors, the way help can curdle into a lifelong IOU. Forgetting, here, is not amnesia but refusal to weaponize memory.

Then he flips the frame. "Take without forgetting" is a corrective to the cultural fantasy that receiving is passive or guilt-free. The taker is blessed only if they carry the memory forward - not as shame, but as moral data: someone invested in you. Gratitude becomes an active stance, a discipline, maybe even a repayment plan measured in future care rather than cash.

The subtext is quietly radical: healthy communities run on asymmetry, on moments when one person can give more than another. Meltzer legitimizes that imbalance while insisting it not become domination on either side. In the mouth of a lawyer, the line reads like a peace treaty between pride and dependence: give cleanly, receive honestly, and let memory serve gratitude, not control.