Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Truth gets a warm reception, Hobbes implies, right up until it starts costing someone something. The line is engineered like a trap: it sounds like a mild observation about human openness, then snaps shut around the real claim - that what we call a love of truth is often just a love of convenience. By qualifying truth as the kind that "opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure", Hobbes isn’t praising toleration; he’s sketching the boundary where toleration collapses. People don’t reject ideas because they’re false, they reject them because they’re expensive.

The subtext is pure Hobbesian anthropology: humans are not primarily truth-seekers but advantage-seekers, motivated by appetite, fear, and rivalry. A "welcome" truth is one that flatters existing interests, props up status, or at least stays out of the way. The moment truth becomes adversarial - threatening livelihoods, reputations, doctrines, or comfort - it turns into heresy, sedition, bad vibes. Hobbes is diagnosing the politics of belief: ideas survive not only on evidence but on whether they can coexist with the incentive structure of a society.

Context matters. Writing amid England’s civil conflict and the long hangover of religious war, Hobbes watched competing factions claim divine or moral certainty while pursuing power. This sentence distills his skepticism toward public virtue: the marketplace of ideas is not a neutral forum but a field of interests. It’s also a warning to anyone naive enough to think truth wins on its own merits. In Hobbes’s world, persuasion is inseparable from what it threatens to take away.