Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

For a novelist who made inner life into plot, Richardson’s “Love is not a volunteer thing” lands like a rebuke to the era’s favorite polite fiction: that feeling can be governed by good breeding and good sense. The phrasing is almost legalistic. “Volunteer” isn’t the glowing modern noun of altruism; it’s the verb’s shadow, suggesting an act you offer up freely, like joining a cause. Richardson denies love that dignity. You don’t enlist; you’re conscripted.

That’s the intent: to strip romance of its flattering mythology and replace it with psychological compulsion. In the world of Pamela and Clarissa, where reputation, marriage, and economic survival are always in the room, this matters. If love isn’t chosen, then it can’t be fully moralized. Virtue might be trained, but desire arrives untrained. That destabilizes the period’s tidy equation between self-command and worthiness, especially for women expected to translate feeling into acceptable duty.

The subtext is sharper: calling love “not a volunteer thing” also questions the sincerity of social scripts. Courtship culture likes to treat passion as a controlled performance, a set of gestures you opt into. Richardson points to the embarrassing truth underneath the performance: attachment forms despite strategy, despite caution, despite the self’s best PR. It’s a line that sounds modest but carries a quiet threat. If love is involuntary, then it can’t be reliably domesticated by manners, sermons, or even narrative closure. The heart, in Richardson’s hands, isn’t a free agent; it’s a force that complicates every claim to rational control.