Daily Inspiration Quote by John Morley

Moral certainty is cheap; Morley is arguing for moral capacity. His line flatly demotes “good opinions” from virtue to raw material, valuable only when carried with a mind large enough to keep them from becoming weapons. Coming from a statesman, that’s not a salon-friendly plea for open-mindedness but a warning about governance: politics is littered with people who are right in principle and disastrous in practice because their righteousness is narrow, brittle, and loud.

The sentence works by shifting the burden from content to posture. “Good opinions” flatters the reader for having the correct view, then immediately strips that comfort away: correctness without “broad, intelligent, and spacious” holding is “worth very little.” The subtext is that opinions aren’t just private convictions; they are social forces. Held tightly, even admirable beliefs turn into pretexts for cruelty, censorship, or moral vanity. Held spaciously, they become something closer to judgment: the ability to weigh competing goods, recognize tradeoffs, and stay alert to new facts without collapsing into cynicism.

Morley’s triad matters. “Broad” suggests range and tolerance, “intelligent” demands rigor rather than vibes, “spacious” implies an inner architecture roomy enough for complexity, doubt, and the humanity of opponents. In the late-19th-century liberal tradition Morley inhabited, that’s a defense of pluralism under pressure: empire, class conflict, religious fracture. The line quietly insists that the health of public life depends less on who has the “right” opinions and more on who can carry them without shrinking the world.