Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Charity, Fuller implies, is supposed to have an address - but not a border. The line opens with a concession to human nature: our first loyalties are local, instinctive, intimate. Home is where need is visible, where obligation can’t be abstracted into a slogan. That first clause flatters the reader’s sense of responsibility and common sense; it’s a moral starting point that even the suspicious can accept.

Then Fuller pivots, and the pivot is the whole engine. “But should not end there” turns domestic virtue into a potential alibi. It’s a warning against the cozy ethics that let people feed their own while shrugging at everyone else. The subtext is blunt: if your compassion stops at your doorstep, it isn’t compassion so much as tribal bookkeeping.

As a 17th-century English clergyman writing in a society racked by inequality, religious fracture, and political instability, Fuller isn’t offering a feel-good aphorism. He’s policing a temptation common to both households and nations: to treat care as a finite resource, to call self-protection “prudence,” to mistake parochial decency for righteousness. The sentence works because it’s balanced like a sermon and sharp like a rebuke. It acknowledges the moral reality of proximity while insisting that true charity expands outward, not by abandoning family, but by refusing to let family become the excuse that starves the stranger.