Daily Inspiration Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

A novelist who made a career out of puncturing Victorian self-regard, Thackeray knows exactly how slippery "excellence" gets once it enters society. The line flatters achievement, but it also quietly demotes it: after excellence itself, the next best thing is not ambition, not effort, not even improvement, but the ability to recognize excellence when it appears. That ranking is a small social grenade. It shifts prestige away from the producer and toward the observer, implying that taste is a moral faculty, not just a preference.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it reads like a generous nod to audiences, readers, and patrons: making something great is rare; knowing greatness is almost as rare and deserves respect. Underneath, it’s a critique of a culture that confuses noise for merit. Thackeray’s world was thick with status signals, fashionable enthusiasms, and reputations manufactured by proximity. Appreciation becomes a form of ethical resistance: to admire the right thing is to refuse the wrong idols.

It also carries a novelist’s self-interested truth. Writers live or die not only by what they make, but by whether anyone has the discernment to meet the work at its level. "Appreciation" here isn’t passive applause; it’s educated attention, the kind that can separate craft from mere display.

Context matters: mid-19th-century Britain is industrializing, mass culture is expanding, and "good taste" is a battlefield. Thackeray turns taste into a civic act, suggesting that a society’s second-highest virtue is simply knowing what deserves to be valued.