Daily Inspiration Quote by Beilby Porteus

Anxiety is a time machine that only goes to bad neighborhoods. Porteus, an 18th-century Anglican bishop with a pastor's eye for human self-torment, distills a whole theology of worry into one clean barb: anticipating disaster doesn’t prevent it; it rehearses it. The phrase "foresees calamities" sounds almost like a virtue in an Enlightenment age that prized prudence and moral accounting. Porteus flips that expectation. Forecasting becomes a kind of spiritual masochism, a self-inflicted doubling of pain.

The line works because it argues against a culturally respectable habit. In Georgian Britain, public life was thick with genuine precarity: war, disease, political upheaval, economic swings. Clergymen were expected to offer counsel that stabilized households and consciences. Porteus isn’t denying catastrophe; he’s attacking the mental compulsion to live inside it before it arrives. "Suffers them twice over" is blunt arithmetic, turning mood into a ledger entry. That bookkeeping metaphor would have landed with an audience trained to examine the soul the way merchants examined accounts.

The subtext is pastoral and slightly corrective: you can call your worry "foresight", but it’s still despair with better branding. Coming from a cleric, the implied alternative isn’t naive optimism; it’s discipline of attention, faith as an antidote to pre-suffering. Porteus treats worry less as a feeling than as a moral practice - one that compounds interest on misery.