Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

The medieval mind loved a ladder: higher effort, higher holiness, higher reward. Aquinas kicks that ladder sideways. "Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious" is a corrective aimed at a spiritual culture that could easily confuse pain with virtue, spectacle with sanctity. In an era when ascetic feats and rigorous devotions were often treated as proof of moral seriousness, he insists on a more discriminating moral arithmetic: merit isn’t measured by sweat alone.

The line works because it quietly smuggles in Aquinas’s core ethical realism. For him, the moral value of an act turns on its object and its alignment with reason and charity, not on how punishing it feels. Difficulty can come from external obstacles, temperament, bad habits, even poor planning. A task can be hard because it’s ill-chosen. A scruple can be hard because it’s scrupulous. Aquinas’s subtext is almost pastoral: don’t romanticize your own strain. If the goal is union with the good, difficulty is an incidental feature, sometimes even a warning label.

Context matters: Aquinas is writing inside a Christian framework where "merit" has theological stakes, tied to virtue, grace, and intention. He’s also tempering a marketplace of piety where people might chase spiritual "hard modes" to feel advanced. The sentence is a medieval version of a modern critique of hustle culture: effort is not a moral credential. Sometimes the most meritorious act is the one that looks easy because it’s formed by the right habits, directed by clear judgment, and animated by love rather than self-display.