Life & Wisdom Quote by Horace Smith

Good advice, in Horace Smith's telling, lands less like a gift than a bruise: well-meant, sure, but still an imposition. The line works because it flips the usual moral math. Advice is supposed to be generosity; Smith recasts it as a minor act of aggression that decent people are expected to pardon. That inversion gives the sentence its bite, and its accuracy. Advice rarely arrives as pure information. It smuggles in hierarchy: I see your situation clearly, I know better, I have standing to correct you. Even when it's right, it can sting because it turns a private struggle into a public performance of competence.

The phrasing is slyly judicial. "Injuries" is a big word for a small offense, which is the joke and the point: social life is built on tiny wounds we agree not to litigate. Then Smith tightens the screw with "good man ought" - a moral obligation not just to accept advice, but to manage the adviser. Forgive if you can; if not, "forget at once". That last clause is less saintly than pragmatic. Remembering good advice means remembering the moment you were caught needing it.

Context matters: Smith writes from a Regency-era culture obsessed with manners, status, and conversational weapons disguised as civility. In that world, advice is a polite form of control, a way to steer others while keeping your hands clean. The subtext isn't anti-wisdom; it's anti-patronage. Smith isn't warning us away from learning. He's warning us that being advised, and advising, are both morally charged acts - and that the cleanest way to preserve dignity is amnesia.