Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Steele

Flattery is already moral basement living; Steele’s extra twist is to reserve the trapdoor for the person who envies the flatterer. The line isn’t just a tidy insult. It’s a diagnosis of a social economy where praise is currency, and the worst corruption isn’t merely spending it cheaply but longing for the job of counterfeit banker.

Steele, a dramatist and co-founder of the early 18th-century periodical culture (The Tatler, The Spectator), wrote for a world of coffeehouses, patronage networks, and reputations that could be made or ruined by public talk. In that setting, the flatterer is contemptible because he treats other people’s vanity as a lever: he performs admiration to gain access, favor, or protection. But Steele’s real target is the envious observer, the person who sees the flatterer “winning” and doesn’t recoil at the method; he resents not the moral ugliness, but the missed opportunity.

The subtext is brutally modern: envy is not simply wanting what someone has; it’s wanting to be the kind of person who can stomach the transaction. Steele implies that flattery’s success depends on a wider complicity. A culture that rewards sham admiration will inevitably breed people who aspire to the sham.

It works because it turns a common moral hierarchy sideways. We expect envy to be a lesser vice than active manipulation. Steele suggests the opposite: the admirer of manipulation is spiritually poorer than the manipulator, because he has surrendered even the pretense of principle.