Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Fuller turns “bad memory” into a moral and mental housekeeping problem. The line lands with the clipped certainty of a preacher who’s watched people excuse their scattered minds as if forgetfulness were weather: unfortunate, blameless, unavoidable. Instead, he argues memory is downstream from how you think. “Perspicuity, regularity, and order” aren’t decorative virtues; they’re the machinery that makes recall possible. If your thoughts arrive in a crowd, unintroduced and unruly, you can’t expect your mind to file them.

The sharpest move is his demotion of memory from talent to consequence. Complaints about “want of memory” become, in his framing, a dodge that hides a “defect…in the judgment.” That’s not just an insult; it’s a diagnosis of prioritization. Judgment decides what matters, what connects, what can be discarded. Without it, memory isn’t failing you; you’re failing at selection.

Then comes the perfectly barbed paradox: “by grasping at all, retain nothing.” It’s a rebuke to intellectual greed, the impulse to hoard facts, gossip, Scripture, and scholarship as proof of seriousness. In Fuller’s 17th-century clerical world, this is also a warning against indiscriminate reading and undisciplined devotion: piety and learning require structure, not accumulation. The subtext feels surprisingly current. He’s describing an attention economy centuries before the term existed, where the real cognitive sin isn’t forgetting, but refusing to choose.