Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Taylor

A prosperous error is the kind of lie that pays rent. Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican cleric writing in an England shredded by civil war, regicide, and religious whiplash, understood that belief is rarely a neutral search for accuracy. It is often a bargain: comfort and social belonging in exchange for intellectual honesty. His line slices cleanly because it doesn’t flatter the reader with the fantasy of rational independence; it diagnoses preference, not ignorance. People aren’t simply fooled. They choose the version of reality that keeps their status intact, their conscience quiet, their community unthreatened.

The genius is in the adjectives. “Prosperous” makes error sound materially lush, a doctrine with patrons, a story with institutional backing, a worldview that comes with career prospects and polite approval. “Afflicted” turns truth into something bruised and socially costly, the kind of fact that arrives with exile, punishment, or at least an awkward silence at dinner. Taylor’s theology is doing cultural analysis: salvation language smuggled into social psychology. He implies that truth has a moral dimension but not a marketing department.

There’s also a political edge. In Taylor’s era, “truth” wasn’t an abstract virtue; it was a litmus test that could get you ejected from parish life or worse, depending on who held power that year. The subtext is pastoral and unsparing: if you want truth, prepare for discomfort, because the world’s incentives lean hard toward lucrative nonsense. The line still lands now because our errors are increasingly “prosperous” by design, monetized, algorithmically buoyed, and socially rewarded.