Daily Inspiration Quote by Quintilian

Comfort doesn’t just cushion the body; it dulls the imagination. Quintilian’s line is less a moral scolding than a diagnostic: prosperity creates a cognitive blind spot. “Can not easily” matters. He isn’t claiming the wealthy are incapable of empathy, only that their default settings work against it. Misery is not a concept you can fully acquire through description, the way an educated Roman might acquire rhetoric from a handbook. It’s experiential knowledge, and privilege substitutes theory for texture.

As an educator steeped in rhetoric, Quintilian is also warning about a failure of representation. The prosperous tend to translate suffering into abstractions - “the poor,” “the unfortunate,” “the deserving” - categories that keep pain at a safe distance. That’s subtext with a sharp edge: if you’ve never had to choose between dignity and survival, you’ll misread the stakes of other people’s choices, then punish them for acting “irrationally.” Prosperity breeds not only ignorance but confidence in that ignorance.

Contextually, this lands in a Roman world where inequality was not incidental; it was the scaffolding of society, from patronage to slavery. Quintilian taught elites how to persuade in courts and public life. The line doubles as a professional caution: speakers who have only known ease will botch appeals to justice because they’ll underestimate what deprivation does to a person’s options, speech, even temperament. It’s a reminder that rhetoric without proximity to real hardship becomes theater - polished, fluent, and fundamentally inaccurate.