Life & Wisdom Quote by William C. Bryant

Bryant flips the usual moral hierarchy by planting virtue in a messy soil: remorse. Not principle, not purity, not God’s-eye certainty - regret. The line understands character as something grown, not granted, and it insists that the first real evidence of goodness is the ability to feel the sting of having missed it.

The phrasing does quiet work. “Root” is subterranean and unseen; remorse isn’t performative, it’s private. It’s also stabilizing: a root anchors a person against the gusts of appetite, pride, and rationalization. Then Bryant pivots to “fair increase,” an almost agricultural optimism that turns moral pain into a form of capital. Remorse, properly faced, compounds. It becomes “fruits,” visible outcomes that others can taste: repaired relationships, restraint, humility, a more accurate self-knowledge.

The subtext is sharply Protestant in its psychology without being preachy. Innocence isn’t the starting point; it’s the harvest. “Fruits of innocence and blessedness” suggests that what we call innocence in adulthood isn’t naivete but hard-won clarity - the cleaned-up aftermath of confronting one’s own fault. Bryant wrote in a 19th-century America obsessed with moral improvement, self-discipline, and the inner life, and the line reads like an antidote to public virtue-signaling avant la lettre. It implies that virtue without remorse is either luck (you were never tested) or theater (you were, and you lied to yourself).