Daily Inspiration Quote by William Shakespeare

“I say there is no darkness but ignorance” flips the usual moral scenery of Shakespeare’s stage. Darkness, in the popular imagination of his time, isn’t just an absence of light; it’s a whole atmosphere of threat: sin, conspiracy, the devil’s hour, the unknown beyond the city gates. Shakespeare strips that gothic fog of its supernatural power and pins the blame somewhere less romantic and more embarrassing: what people don’t know, and refuse to learn.

The line works because it sounds like reassurance while carrying an accusation. If darkness is ignorance, then the enemy isn’t fate or villains lurking offstage; it’s the self-inflicted blindness of characters (and audiences) who mistake suspicion for insight and habit for truth. Shakespeare loved plots powered by misrecognition: identities confused, motives misread, evidence selectively believed. Calling ignorance “darkness” doesn’t just moralize knowledge; it makes ignorance an active condition that spreads, distorts, and endangers everyone in its reach.

In an early modern England rattled by religious fracture, plague, censorship, and anxious talk of “order,” ignorance wasn’t a private flaw. It was political: rumors could ruin reputations, and superstition could justify cruelty. Shakespeare’s dramas repeatedly show how easily a community decides it “knows” what it’s seeing, only to discover it has been looking in the dark. The sting is that light isn’t granted by angels. It’s made, painfully, by attention, humility, and the willingness to be corrected.