Daily Inspiration Quote by Brigham Young

A chillier kind of honesty hides in Brigham Young's line: the admission that loyalty is rarely pure, and that friendship often contains a competitive ledger we pretend not to keep. "Does not displease us" is exquisitely evasive. It doesn't confess to delight; it only confesses to the absence of sorrow. That rhetorical sidestep is the point. Young is naming a petty impulse while giving the listener just enough moral cover to recognize themselves without openly indicting themselves.

As a 19th-century religious and political leader, Young is also doing governance by psychology. Communities fracture less from open enemies than from the quiet satisfactions people take in each other's stumbles: the relief that the admired are fallible, the confirmation that status can slip, the small rebalancing of envy. He folds that into a proverb-like cadence, the kind that can be repeated at a pulpit or around a table, turning a private vice into a shared caution.

The subtext is a warning about the social corrosiveness of concealed schadenfreude, especially in tight-knit groups built on moral aspiration. If your "best friends" can trigger that reaction, what happens with rivals, dissenters, or newcomers? Young's genius here is his unsparing realism: he doesn't flatter the flock. He reminds them that even affection can carry a shadow motive, and that spiritual community requires not just faith, but vigilance over the small, self-serving pleasures we take when other people fall.