Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Ambition gets the spotlight; Phelps aims her beam at the unglamorous machinery that actually moves a life. The sentence is built to dethrone “great things” without denying their allure: “straining” carries a whiff of moral vanity, the self-dramatizing effort that looks impressive but often produces more posture than progress. Against that, she places “doing,” an unshowy verb that implies repetition, competence, and follow-through. It’s a quiet rhetorical switch from aspiration to practice, from the heroic to the habitual.

The subtext is almost proto-modern: self-improvement isn’t a breakthrough, it’s a cadence. “Little things” and “common duties” sound domestic and quotidian, and in Phelps’s 19th-century context that matters. As a woman writer navigating an era that romanticized grand public deeds (and often reserved them for men), she’s arguing for a different moral economy: the everyday isn’t lesser, it’s the true arena of character. That’s not simply conservative piety. It’s a claim about power - the kind available to people whose lives are structured around obligation, care, work, and constraint.

The phrase “a little better and better” is the coup. No finish line, no single triumph. Just incrementalism, almost like an ethical version of compound interest. Phelps is making effectiveness sound attainable, even democratic: you don’t need a calling, you need consistency. The line reassures, but it also indicts. If the work is small, you can’t hide behind the myth that change requires a grand moment. You can start now, and you’re responsible now.