Daily Inspiration Quote by Arnold Bennett

The sting in Bennett's line is how politely it skewers a very human habit: treating our judgments as clean, objective verdicts while suspecting everyone else's of bias. He hands you "godlike and superior impartiality" like a trophy, then lets the phrase curdle in your mouth. The joke is structural. By inflating the judge's posture to divine heights, Bennett exposes the ego hiding inside ordinary moral appraisal, especially among friends where we feel most entitled to keep score.

The specific intent isn't to preach tolerance in the abstract; it's to puncture the comforting fantasy that you're the reasonable one in the relationship. Friendship, in Bennett's framing, is a two-way courtroom where both parties imagine themselves on the bench. The subtext is almost petty in its accuracy: when you're "judging a friend", you're often laundering disappointment, envy, or self-protection into a pose of principle. Bennett forces the mirror on you. Your critique lands on someone who is, at that exact moment, running their own internal review of your performance with equal confidence and equal blind spots.

Context matters. Bennett wrote in an era obsessed with manners, self-improvement, and the social choreography of respectability. His fiction often tracks the quiet power struggles of ordinary life, where status and self-image do more work than grand ideals. This aphorism belongs to that world: a dry, modern reminder that moral certainty is frequently just vanity with better diction, and that friendship survives not on superior judgment, but on the humility to suspect your own.