Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Lamb

Good taste, Lamb suggests, isn’t a trophy you win by picking the “right” thing; it’s a test you take afterward, in the private audit of whether your choice actually nourishes you. The line flips a familiar moral posture on its head. Instead of treating decision-making as a grim courtroom where Reason pronounces verdicts, Lamb makes satisfaction the evidence. The standard isn’t external approval or abstract correctness, but the lived capacity to “like” what you’ve aligned yourself with.

That verb choice matters. “Likes” sounds almost embarrassingly plain, even childish, and that’s part of the sly force: Lamb smuggles a radical claim through everyday language. He’s not romanticizing impulse. He’s arguing for congruence - for the idea that judgment is proved by a durable, repeatable pleasure that can say, with time, “yes, this still feels right.” “Finds good” adds a second register: not just enjoyment, but an ethical and aesthetic recognition that the chosen thing has worth. Pleasure alone can be fickle; goodness alone can be performative. Lamb wants the overlap.

As a critic in the early 19th century, writing in an era that prized propriety, canon, and the slow rise of middle-class self-improvement, Lamb’s emphasis on inward assent reads like a gentle rebellion. It deflates status-chasing and secondhand opinion. The subtext is pointed: if your “good” choices make you miserable, you haven’t chosen well - you’ve complied well.