Daily Inspiration Quote by Steve Allen

Steve Allen’s line lands like a rimshot: it flatters you with a “nice thing” and then quietly robs your anxiety of its authority. Coming from an entertainer, it isn’t armchair philosophy so much as stagecraft - a comedian’s instinct that the scariest monster is often the one you’ve helped the lighting designer invent. The phrasing is doing the work. “A good many” is breezy, almost chatty, refusing the grandiose claim that all problems are imaginary; Allen isn’t selling denial, he’s selling proportion. The joke is humane because it leaves room for real hardship while still insisting that much of what passes for crisis is self-authored.

The subtext is about control. Imagined problems feel inevitable precisely because they’re internal: they mutate, recruit worst-case scenarios, and reproduce in downtime. Allen’s sentence punctures that loop by reframing “problem” as a mental event, not a fact on the ground. It invites a practical skepticism: before you mobilize your whole nervous system, check whether the threat exists outside your head.

Context matters, too. Allen came up in midcentury American mass media, a world built on timing, nerves, and performance - live TV, touring, constant public scrutiny. Entertainers are professional catastrophizers: you rehearse failure for a living (the bomb, the flop, the awkward silence). This reads like backstage wisdom turned outward. It’s also a subtle critique of a culture that treats worry as virtue. Allen implies that endless preoccupation isn’t responsibility; sometimes it’s just imagination running without adult supervision.