Daily Inspiration Quote by Jane Porter

Porter is diagnosing a classic social reflex: when someone behaves with real moral scale, the room doesn’t rise to meet it - it shrinks back and calls it suspicious. “Sublime conduct” isn’t just good behavior; it’s the kind of courage or self-sacrifice that breaks the everyday logic of self-interest. So the onlookers, “astonished,” reach for the next available explanation: danger. Alarm becomes a defense mechanism, a way to downgrade the unfamiliar into something manageable. If greatness can be reclassified as threat, no one has to ask what their own caution costs.

The knife twist is her second sentence: “none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it.” That isn’t a cozy uplift; it’s an exclusionary theory of moral perception. Porter implies that admiration is not purely a matter of taste but of capacity. If you can’t imagine acting greatly, you can’t reliably recognize it in others - you will misread it as vanity, manipulation, or madness. Greatness becomes legible only to a mind trained by its own willingness to risk.

As a novelist in the Romantic era, Porter is writing into a culture newly obsessed with the “sublime” - awe that borders on terror. She flips that aesthetic into social commentary: the sublime person triggers the same shiver as a storm. The subtext is pointedly political and gendered, too. In a world policing reputation and decorum, especially for women, exceptional virtue can look like transgression. Porter’s line defends the misunderstood hero by indicting the audience: your fear is evidence of your limits, not their fault.