Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Smith Surtees

Surtees is smuggling a whole theory of human behavior into a single, slightly barbed contrast. “Flattered into virtue” turns morality from a stern commandment into a social transaction: praise isn’t just decoration, it’s leverage. The line assumes people aren’t primarily reformed by fear or shame but by the desire to be seen as decent, competent, and admirable. Virtue, in this frame, is often performed first, then internalized later. You act like the person others already believe you are because it’s easier than disappointing them.

The counterweight - “bullied out of vice” - is a jab at moral scolding as a strategy. Bullying produces compliance, not conversion; it tends to harden identity around the very behavior it claims to correct. Vice becomes a stubborn badge when outsiders try to rip it off. Surtees’s phrasing is tidy but not gentle: it suggests that reformers who rely on intimidation are less principled than they think, because their method treats people as problems to be crushed rather than egos to be steered.

Context matters: Surtees wrote in a 19th-century Britain obsessed with respectability, where reputation functioned like currency and public judgment could be both entertainment and enforcement. As a novelist with a satiric eye for class manners, he’s pointing out that social approval can do what sermons can’t. The subtext is almost cynical: if you want better behavior, stop acting like a prosecutor and start acting like an audience ready to applaud.