Life & Wisdom Quote by William Shenstone

Second thoughts get romanticized as wisdom arriving late, but Shenstone flips that consolation into a warning: the mind’s “correction” can be a corrosive downgrade. As a poet of the mid-18th century, Shenstone writes from a culture newly addicted to refinement - polishing taste, revising manners, improving the self. His line suggests that refinement has a dark twin: rumination. “Oftentimes” matters. He’s not arguing for stubbornness as a virtue; he’s diagnosing a recurring human failure mode, the way reconsideration can become self-betrayal.

The bite comes from the absolutist punch inside a modest phrase. “Second thoughts” sound harmless, even prudent. “The very worst of all thoughts” detonates the expectation. Shenstone isn’t talking about genuine reflection that prevents harm; he’s pointing at the second-guessing that turns courage into caution, affection into suspicion, and decision into paralysis. It’s the psychological moment when the first thought was an honest impulse and the second is the nervous committee meeting in your head, populated by imagined judges.

Subtextually, the line defends instinct as a kind of moral clarity. First thoughts can be naïve, but they’re also unstrategic: less performative, less compromised by social consequence. The second thought is where vanity and fear sneak in, where you start editing yourself to fit the room. In an era when politeness and sensibility were becoming social currencies, Shenstone’s aphorism reads like a quiet rebellion: sometimes the “improved” version of your mind is simply the more cowardly one.