War & Peace Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson’s line reads like nutritional advice, but it’s really a moral technology: a way of disciplining the body so the mind can be put to work. “Quantity” over “quality” sounds backwards to modern ears trained by foodie culture, yet that inversion is the point. He isn’t praising cheap, tasteless food; he’s warning against the seductions of abundance. A “full meal” becomes an enemy not because it’s unhealthy in some clinical sense, but because satiety produces softness: sleepiness, self-satisfaction, a turning inward toward comfort rather than outward toward labor.

The subtext is Protestant-era self-management. In early 18th-century Britain, “industry” was both an economic virtue and a moral one, increasingly linked to social mobility and respectability. Richardson, a printer turned novelist who wrote obsessively about virtue, restraint, and social consequence, treats appetite as the gateway vice. If you can’t govern eating, how will you govern desire, money, time, sexuality? His phrasing makes the stomach a rival institution to the desk: feed one too much and the other loses.

There’s also a class-coded caution embedded here. “Quality” implies refinement and choice; Richardson waves it off in favor of moderation, a posture that flatters the hardworking middle. Eat enough to function, not enough to luxuriate. It’s a small sentence with a big agenda: to turn private consumption into a public ethic, and to make productivity feel like righteousness.