Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Otway

Otway’s line lands like a jab at the tidy Enlightenment fantasy before the Enlightenment even fully arrives: that life can be made reliable if only you wind it correctly. Clocks, newly prestigious in the late 17th century, are the era’s favorite metaphor for order - mechanical, legible, disciplined. Set the hands, trust the sequence. Otway grants the machine its comfortingly limited dignity: it will “go as [it is] set.” Then he pivots to the real target: “irregular man,” a phrase that doesn’t just mean unpredictable, but deviant from the rule, off the grid of measurement.

The rhetoric works by staging a humiliating comparison. The clock is obedient because it lacks choice; man is inconsistent because he has it. That’s the sting: human freedom isn’t romantic here, it’s a liability. “Never constant, never certain” doubles down with courtroom precision, like testimony against the species. Otway’s dramatist instinct shows in the cadence - the line feels spoken in exasperation, likely in the wake of betrayal, jealousy, or some sudden reversal of vows. Restoration drama thrives on the gap between declared principle and actual appetite; this sentence is practically a mission statement for plots built on unreliable promises.

The subtext is moral and political at once. Post-Civil War England is hungry for stable institutions, yet daily life keeps demonstrating that character, loyalty, even “honor” are adjustable. Otway isn’t praising the clock; he’s mourning that humans can’t be set the same way - and implying that anyone who thinks they can “fix” people like mechanisms is either naive or selling something.