Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Fuller’s line has the clipped authority of a pulpit maxim, the kind meant to travel farther than the sermon that birthed it. “Slight” does double duty: it means both “treat as trivial” and “be slight yourself.” The instruction isn’t to deny pain in a modern, self-help way, but to refuse the social and spiritual escalation that turns a scratch into a feud. In a world of thin skins and thick consequences, attention is fuel; deprive petty harms of oxygen and they die.

The subtext is less about stoicism than about governance of the self. Fuller, a 17th-century English clergyman writing through civil conflict, understood how quickly minor slights metastasize into faction, grievance, and righteous revenge. By framing “small injuries” as something you can choose to minimize, he puts moral agency where people most like to pretend they have none: in the first reaction. The phrase “none at all” is not literal; it’s rhetorical compression. He’s describing a psychological and communal truth: many hurts become real because we rehearse them, narrate them, recruit witnesses, and let them reorganize our identity.

It also carries an implicit hierarchy of harms. Fuller isn’t excusing serious wrongdoing; he’s policing the everyday economy of offense, the micro-debts that keep communities permanently insolvent. The line works because it flatters restraint without romanticizing passivity. It’s a call to proportion, an old religious technology for living among other imperfect people without making their imperfections your life’s work.