Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert South

Similes are the sugar packets of persuasion: nutritionally irrelevant, instantly energizing, and hard to resist when the coffee is bad. Robert South, a Restoration-era clergyman with a polemicist's edge, isn’t condemning figurative language so much as exposing a quiet bargain at the heart of public argument. Proof is heavy labor; comparison is crowd control.

The line works because it refuses to flatter rhetoric. South grants the courtroom virtue to logic and evidence, then pivots to the human problem: nobody wants to sit through logic for long. The phrase "prove nothing" is deliberately blunt, a Puritan-adjacent suspicion of ornament. Yet "greatly lighten and relieve" concedes that ornament is not merely decorative; it’s analgesic. Similes are pain management for the listener and stagecraft for the speaker, a way to keep attention from wandering when the argument becomes a slog.

South’s context matters. As a preacher in an age when sermons doubled as mass media and theological disputes had real political stakes, he knew how easily verbal brilliance can impersonate truth. The subtext is pastoral and tactical: don’t confuse the pleasing with the probative, especially when souls, institutions, or reputations hang on the outcome. Still, he’s too savvy to pretend argument can survive on bare syllogism. He’s describing rhetoric as a necessary vice: not an engine of truth, but a lubricant that keeps the machine from seizing.

Read now, it lands as a warning about modern discourse too: analogy-driven takes go viral because they make complexity feel legible. That doesn’t make them wrong. It just means they’re doing a different job than proof.