Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert South

Noise can win attention; restraint can win allegiance. South’s line is built like a moral booby trap: “loquacity” doesn’t merely speak, it “storms the ear” - a verb of siege that frames talkativeness as force, even violation. The “ear” is the most exposed of senses, easy to capture and just as easy to exhaust. Then comes the quiet reversal: “modesty takes the heart.” “Takes” is just as assertive as “storms,” but it’s intimate, almost tender, suggesting persuasion without coercion. The epigram flatters silence not as passivity, but as a different kind of power.

As a 17th-century Anglican clergyman, South was writing in a culture where sermons were public performances and verbal virtuosity could be mistaken for virtue itself. Post-Civil War England was saturated with polemic, factional rhetoric, and clerical one-upmanship. In that environment, “loquacity” reads as a social and spiritual temptation: the impulse to dominate a room, to substitute fluency for truth, to treat speech as self-advertisement. “Modesty,” by contrast, is not just shyness; it’s disciplined self-placement - a posture that signals trustworthiness in an age suspicious of zealots and windbags alike.

The subtext is a warning to speakers (especially religious ones): the crowd may reward volume, but moral authority is earned through measured presence. South is also shrewd about audience psychology. People remember the person who made them feel safe more than the person who made them feel impressed. In a single couplet, he turns charisma inside out: the real conquest is not of attention, but of confidence.