Daily Inspiration Quote by Carlo Goldoni

Goldoni lands the jab with a playwright’s economy: the man who stays put isn’t merely uninformed, he’s “full” of prejudice, stuffed with assumptions the way a closed room gets stale. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that bias is a moral defect only bad people have. Goldoni frames prejudice as a predictable byproduct of immobility. If your world never changes, your mind fills in the gaps with folklore, fear, and flattering myths about “us” versus “them.”

As an 18th-century Venetian, Goldoni wrote in a Europe where borders were porous for merchants, soldiers, and aristocrats, yet psychologically rigid in the way cities and courts caricatured one another. His comedies thrived on social types - the braggart, the miser, the provincial - and this maxim reads like a line aimed at those very characters: people whose certainty is inversely proportional to their experience. Travel here isn’t tourism; it’s exposure to contradiction, the rude discovery that other societies function without your customs, your church, your dialect, your hierarchy.

The subtext is also pointedly civic. Venice lived on exchange: goods, languages, schemes, and gossip. To never leave your country is to opt out of the encounter that keeps a cosmopolitan republic alive. Goldoni is not romanticizing foreignness so much as diagnosing nationalism before it hardens into 19th-century ideology. He’s warning that prejudice isn’t just personal ignorance; it’s what happens when a society rewards comfort over contact, and calls that comfort “common sense.”