Daily Inspiration Quote by Lionel Blue

Lionel Blue’s line lands like a wink from the pulpit: spiritual uplift delivered with the prosaic thrum of public transport. “Good things come” is the kind of phrase you expect from a clergyman, a soft-edged promise of providence. Then he yanks it down to street level with “riding the buses,” turning an abstract moral into a specific, mildly comic image of everyday life. The joke isn’t just that buses are unglamorous; it’s that goodness, grace, and even revelation are more likely to arrive amid stale air and timetable delays than in some cathedral-grade epiphany.

The intent is both pastoral and subversive. Blue was known for making faith speak in a modern register, and here he uses self-deprecation as theology: humility as a method, not a pose. The bus functions as shorthand for ordinary people, ordinary budgets, ordinary routines. It also hints at British class cues and the quiet moral politics of shared space: your fellow passengers are not an obstacle to the good life; they are the texture of it.

Subtextually, Blue is resisting the religious tendency to sentimentalize “good things” into cosmic rewards. He’s also resisting the secular tendency to treat the mundane as spiritually empty. The punchline implies a third option: the sacred is not elsewhere. It’s commuter-level, public, and slightly ridiculous. That’s why it works: it doesn’t demand belief so much as it trains attention, making virtue feel less like a sermon and more like a practiced way of seeing.