Daily Inspiration Quote by Hugh Blair

A dour little sentence that smuggles a whole theology of limits into seven words. Blair’s “Only mediocrity of enjoyment is allowed to man” doesn’t just warn against excess; it frames pleasure as a rationed commodity, parceled out by a moral universe that mistrusts intensity. “Allowed” is the tell. Enjoyment isn’t something we cultivate or earn so much as something permitted by an external authority: Providence, conscience, social order. The line reads like a pastor’s preventive medicine for an age increasingly tempted by consumer luxury, urban entertainments, and the Enlightenment’s growing confidence in human happiness as a legitimate project.

Blair, a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment’s pulpit culture, specialized in polished moral instruction: sermons designed to discipline desire without sounding like medieval fire-and-brimstone. “Mediocrity” does double duty here. It gestures toward classical moderation (the golden mean) while also carrying a faint insult: don’t expect too much. High peaks of delight are suspect not only because they risk vice, but because they breed dissatisfaction. The subtext is psychological as much as spiritual: intense pleasure trains the appetite to demand escalation, and the result is restlessness, envy, and moral drift.

It’s a neat rhetorical move. By presenting restrained enjoyment as the human allotment, Blair converts disappointment into virtue. If rapture is off the menu by design, then temperance becomes less a heroic achievement than an act of realism. The sentence offers consolation and control in the same breath: you are not failing at happiness; happiness was never meant to be maximal.