Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Wit can look like bravery because it moves fast, lands cleanly, and often wins the room. Fuller’s jab is that this is a cheap kind of victory. “The more wit the less courage” works as a moral diagnostic: if your first impulse is to be clever, you may be dodging the harder work of standing firm, risking loss, or speaking plainly when plainness costs you.

Coming from a 17th-century English clergyman, the line carries Puritan-era suspicion of theatricality and social gamesmanship. Fuller wrote amid civil war, regime change, and religious conflict - an atmosphere where “courage” wasn’t a metaphor but a daily requirement: to commit publicly, to endure consequences, to resist the temptation of hedged speech. Wit, in that context, can function as a kind of rhetorical armor. It lets you take a swipe while keeping your hands clean. If challenged, you can retreat into “just joking,” the oldest exit ramp from accountability.

The subtext is not anti-humor; it’s anti-evasion. Fuller is pointing at a personality type and a political tactic: the sharp-tongued spectator who can dissect every position yet refuses the vulnerability of belief. Wit becomes a performance of superiority that protects the self from stake and sacrifice. The courage he’s advocating is slower and less dazzling: the willingness to be earnest, to be seen committing, to accept the social penalty that cleverness is designed to avoid.