Daily Inspiration Quote by Loretta Young

Nurture is a domestic verb with a moral payload, and Loretta Young knew exactly how that sounded coming out of an actress who made a career out of poise. She doesn’t say “follow your conscience” or “trust your gut.” Those are slogans. “Nurture” implies conscience isn’t a fixed inner compass; it’s a living thing that can be starved, distorted, or trained into silence. The line quietly rejects the flattering idea that decency is automatic. It has to be fed.

The subtext is Hollywood’s constant bargain: you can keep your image intact by outsourcing your ethics to the studio system, the publicist, the “that’s just how it’s done” chorus. Young’s phrasing pushes back against that. It frames conscience as maintenance work, like rehearsal or skin care or any other discipline required to stay “camera-ready.” In an industry built on performance, she’s insisting the private self also needs craft.

Context matters because Young’s stardom was braided with an era’s moral expectations: the Production Code, Catholic respectability, the weaponized innocence of the “good girl” brand. “Nurture your conscience” reads as both sincere guidance and self-protection: a way to survive the dissonance between public virtue and the compromises demanded behind the scenes. It’s advice that doubles as warning. If you don’t actively cultivate your moral sense, someone else will curate it for you - and they’ll do it in service of profit, not peace.