Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Fuller draws a ruthless moral taxonomy in three beats, each clause tightening the screw. First, he normalizes failure: sin is not exotic, it is human-scale. The line quietly pushes back on the pious theater of spotless living by admitting what everyone in a parish already knows. Then he pivots from act to attitude. The dividing line isn’t whether you fall but what you do after you hit the ground. Grief here isn’t performative self-loathing; it’s evidence that conscience still has a pulse, that the sinner hasn’t made peace with the damage.

The last turn is the kill shot: boasting converts weakness into identity. Fuller’s “devil” isn’t a fantasy creature so much as a social type - the person who turns transgression into swagger, who markets vice as charm or autonomy. That’s not just personal corruption; it’s contagious. A grieved sin stays private and repairable. A bragged-about sin recruits an audience, dares others to follow, and erodes the community’s moral language by reframing harm as entertainment.

Context matters: a 17th-century Anglican clergyman writing in an England bruised by civil war and religious fracture. In that climate, moral seriousness wasn’t merely about individual salvation; it was about keeping a volatile society from sliding further into faction and cynicism. Fuller’s epigram works because it’s compact pastoral psychology: he offers mercy for the fall, dignity for remorse, and zero patience for the cultural glamorization of wrongdoing.