Daily Inspiration Quote by John Stuart Mill

Mill lands the insult with a utilitarian’s precision: originality isn’t just rare, it’s literally invisible to the people who most need it. The sting comes from the claim that the “unoriginal” don’t merely lack new ideas; they lack the sensory equipment to register why novelty matters. It’s a diagnosis of perception, not talent. In that move, Mill flips the usual moralizing about creativity. The problem isn’t that society fails to reward originality; it’s that large parts of society can’t even recognize its payoff until someone else translates it into something safely familiar.

The subtext is political. Mill spent his career defending eccentricity, dissent, and experiments in living against the soft tyranny of public opinion. When he says unoriginal minds “cannot feel the use of” originality, he’s pointing at how conformity reproduces itself: the majority mistakes comfort for truth, repetition for stability, inherited custom for common sense. Originality threatens that equilibrium, so the equilibrium develops antibodies - ridicule, suspicion, “be realistic.”

There’s also an implicit warning to reformers and intellectuals: don’t expect immediate applause from the crowd. If people cannot “feel” the utility of originality, persuasion won’t be a single brilliant argument; it will be slow acclimatization, the work of making the new legible. Mill’s line is sharp because it frames originality as a public good with a tragic paradox: the very minds that benefit from it are often the least equipped to demand it.