Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Bravery doesn’t exit with a trumpet blast here; it leaks, humiliatingly, through the body like a bad cold sweat. Sheridan’s genius is to make cowardice tactile. “My valor is certainly going” starts with the polite diction of a man trying to keep control of his self-image, but the sentence immediately betrays him: valor isn’t being spent nobly, it’s “sneaking off,” behaving like a thief. The comic bite is in the mismatch between what the speaker wants to project (the gentleman of nerve) and what his physiology is broadcasting (panic, in real time).

Then Sheridan lands the most modern part of the joke: anxiety as a grotesque medical report. “I feel it oozing out… at the palms of my hands” turns fear into a measurable discharge. It’s funny because it’s over-specific and embarrassingly intimate; it’s also sharp because it punctures the period’s stiff ideal of masculine honor. If courage is supposed to be an inner essence, Sheridan treats it like a fluid that can’t be contained, as if the body itself is defecting.

In context, Sheridan’s comedies love this kind of social unmasking: characters talk like heroes until circumstances demand actual nerve. The line ridicules the theater of bravery - the poses, the rhetoric, the self-flattery - by showing how quickly it collapses into sweaty palms. Sheridan isn’t just mocking one frightened man; he’s mocking a culture that confuses the performance of valor with the real thing.