Daily Inspiration Quote by George Gissing

Gissing’s line lands like a dare, not a pep talk. “Have the courage of your desire” reframes wanting as an act with consequences, the kind that requires backbone because it risks exposure: to yourself, to other people, to the social order that benefits when you keep your appetites modest and your ambitions deniable. “Courage” is doing a lot of work here. It implies that desire is not merely felt; it is chosen, owned, defended. The phrase refuses the Victorian habit of dressing longing in euphemism and moral posture. If you want something, the sentence suggests, stop laundering it into respectability. Admit it. Then act.

That insistence makes sense coming from Gissing, a novelist steeped in the pressures of late-19th-century Britain: rigid class hierarchies, anxious respectability, and the constant threat of falling out of the narrow band of “proper” life. His fiction often tracks people whose inner lives are bigger than their circumstances allow. In that world, desire is dangerous because it pulls against the script: marry prudently, work dutifully, keep your head down, and above all don’t confuse yearning with entitlement.

The subtext is both liberating and bleak. Liberating, because it treats desire as a legitimate source of direction rather than a private shame. Bleak, because it assumes you’ll need courage precisely because the world won’t reward honesty. Gissing isn’t promising fulfillment; he’s demanding integrity. The line’s sting is that it makes self-betrayal look cowardly, and for Gissing’s characters - and readers - that’s harder to forgive than failure.