Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s line treats luck like a smug harbor master: ships arrive, cargo intact, crews untested, and no one at the helm. “Fortune brings in” makes chance an active force, a stagehand rolling in a prop that looks like destiny. The sting is in the passive phrasing. These boats “are not steered” - not “weren’t steered by me,” not “lost their pilot,” just fundamentally ungoverned. It’s a neat little indictment of how easily people confuse arrival with achievement.

The intent isn’t to praise Fortune’s generosity so much as to sour it. In Shakespeare’s world, success often turns on misdelivery: letters fail to arrive, coincidences engineer reunions, storms redirect plots. Comedy and tragedy share this mechanism. Characters build elaborate narratives about merit and control, while the play keeps reminding you that outcomes are fickle, sometimes accidental, sometimes undeserved. That’s the subtext: the universe is not a moral accountant. It can reward the idle and punish the diligent with the same indifferent elegance.

Contextually, this fits the Elizabethan obsession with Fortune’s wheel, an old idea with a theatrical edge: today’s winner is tomorrow’s spectacle. Shakespeare uses the image of an unsteered boat to puncture human vanity and to foreshadow instability. What comes in without guidance can just as easily drift out, wreck, or be claimed by whoever shows up first. The line works because it’s both consoling and threatening: if you’ve failed, maybe it wasn’t you; if you’ve succeeded, don’t get smug.