Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Otway

Honesty, in Otway's telling, isn't a virtue so much as a furnishing. The image is deliberately domestic and degrading: "soft easy cushions" suggests comfort bought at someone else's expense, while "repose and fatten" turns corruption into a kind of lazy digestion. Knaves don't merely take advantage of honest men; they luxuriate on them, gaining weight and power while the honorable supply the padding. It's a savage inversion of the moral order, and it's funny in the bleak way Restoration drama often is: the line has the snap of an epigram, but the worldview is bruised.

Otway wrote in a period obsessed with masks, manners, and social climbing, when public life was a performance and private motives were hard to read. His plays are full of characters who weaponize charm and sentiment, and the quote reads like a warning from someone who's watched sincerity get gamed too many times. The subtext isn't "don't be honest"; it's "stop being useful to predators". "Soft" and "easy" are doing moral work here, implying that virtue without boundaries becomes a material others can exploit.

There's also class anxiety in the upholstery metaphor: honest labor becomes literal support for those skilled at scheming. Otway isn't praising knaves for their cleverness; he's indicting a society that rewards them, and he's indicting the honest for confusing goodness with passivity. The sting is that the cushion doesn't fight back - it just absorbs.