Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

A clean moral scalpel: blame is cheap, self-scrutiny is expensive. Richardson’s line isn’t interested in excusing bad behavior so much as exposing a familiar social economy, where criticism functions like spare change everyone carries and virtue is a currency almost no one can mint on demand. The phrasing does the work. “Much easier” is a quiet indictment of human laziness; it assumes we already know the hierarchy of effort and are choosing the low road anyway. And “faultless” is deliberately absolute, a word that makes the whole enterprise of judging others look absurd. If perfection is the standard we implicitly demand, then everyone is disqualified - including the judge.

Richardson writes from a culture obsessed with propriety, reputation, and moral accounting. In the 18th-century novel - and especially in Richardson’s epistolary worlds where characters narrate themselves in real time - people are constantly litigating virtue: who behaved correctly, who crossed a line, who deserves forgiveness. The subtext is less “be nicer” than “notice the performance.” Fault-finding can be a way to signal one’s own rectitude without doing the harder work of actually living it. It’s social positioning disguised as ethical concern.

The sting is that he doesn’t offer an alternative standard. He leaves you with a mirror. If you’re quick to spot someone else’s flaw, the line suggests, you’re not perceptive so much as opportunistic - outsourcing your self-improvement to someone else’s failure.