Daily Inspiration Quote by John Morton

Gratitude, here, isn’t pious wallpaper. It’s a declaration of sovereignty. When John Morton, a late-medieval cleric who rose through the brutal, bargain-driven politics of 15th-century England, says he’s grateful he’s got his mind, he’s naming the one asset that can’t be confiscated by a rival faction, a suspicious monarch, or the church’s own machinery of obedience. In an era when bodies could be imprisoned and property seized, the “mind” is the portable fortress: judgment, memory, strategy, the ability to read a room before it turns lethal.

“I can take care of my own business” lands like a polite refusal to be managed. Coming from a clergyman, it quietly rebukes the expectation that virtue equals submissiveness. Morton’s career (threading the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor consolidation) would have demanded an almost athletic intelligence: knowing when to speak, when to withhold, when to present loyalty as principle rather than self-preservation. The line’s restraint is the point. It doesn’t brag about power; it asserts competence. That makes it socially safe while still staking a claim.

The subtext is less “I’m independent” than “I’m not available for your agenda.” It’s the voice of someone who understands that institutions run on other people’s compliance, and that the first act of resistance is mental: keeping your counsel, holding your own reasoning intact, and refusing to outsource your life to whoever currently wears the ring or the mitre.