Daily Inspiration Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes isn’t confessing to solipsism so much as diagnosing a market society that runs on collective nerves. “Nothing mattered” is deliberately absolutist, a provocation aimed at the tidy Victorian belief that economics is about solid things: factories, gold, output. He’s insisting that in capitalism, the supposedly hard world is constantly rerouted through the soft infrastructure of expectation. Prices, investment, even employment hinge less on what is true than on what feels true, especially under uncertainty.

The quiet sting is in “chiefly our own.” Keynes shifts blame away from impersonal “forces” and onto the self-importance of decision-makers: investors, politicians, central bankers, and the respectable classes who like to imagine they’re rational adults. It’s an unsparing reminder that confidence isn’t a side effect; it’s an input. In the General Theory era, after the First World War and into the trauma of the Great Depression, he watched economies stall not because society forgot how to build, but because fear and caution became contagious. Liquidity preference, the paradox of thrift, “animal spirits” - his whole project is an argument that mass psychology can freeze a nation.

The line also hints at a political agenda: if moods move markets, then policy can’t be a passive referee. Government has to counter-stimulate when private optimism collapses. Keynes is smuggling a radical claim into a cool sentence: the economy is a story we tell ourselves, and when the story turns bleak, the damage is real.