Daily Inspiration Quote by William Ralph Inge

Originality, Inge suggests, isn’t a thunderclap from the heavens; it’s a magic trick that depends on the audience’s eyesight. Calling it “undetected plagiarism” is a deliberately acidic inversion of the Romantic myth of the lone genius. He’s not praising theft so much as puncturing the piety around novelty: what we celebrate as new is often old material rearranged, laundered through personality, timing, and selective memory.

The line works because it collapses a moral category (plagiarism) into an aesthetic one (originality), forcing a discomforting question: if every thinker is borrowing, why do we reserve outrage for the borrower who gets caught? Inge’s clerical background matters here. A clergyman is trained to deal in inheritance - scripture, doctrine, tradition - and to watch how “new” ideas are smuggled into old frameworks with righteous language. His quip doubles as a warning against self-congratulation: the “original” mind may just be the best at forgetting its sources, or the luckiest in having an audience that hasn’t read the footnotes.

Contextually, Inge lived through an era when mass literacy, newspapers, and popular lectures accelerated the circulation of ideas. With that speed comes a paradox: more access to prior work, more opportunities to unknowingly repeat it, and more incentive to brand recycled insights as personal revelation. The subtext is almost pastoral in its skepticism. Creativity is real, but it’s rarely immaculate. It’s more often a careful remix plus the social advantage of arriving at the right moment, sounding confident, and leaving the receipts at home.