Daily Inspiration Quote by Dean Inge

Wisdom here isn’t a trophy for collecting facts; it’s a sorting mechanism. Dean Inge’s line quietly demotes sheer intelligence and elevates judgment: the ability to rank what matters, what merely dazzles, and what can be safely ignored. “Relative value” is the loaded phrase. It suggests that nothing arrives with a permanent price tag, that priorities are contingent, and that the skilled mind is the one that can recalibrate when circumstances change.

Inge, an Anglican cleric and public philosopher in early 20th-century Britain, was writing into an era obsessed with measurement: industrial output, imperial scale, scientific progress, and the bureaucratic urge to quantify human life. The subtext pushes back. If modernity is a machine for making everything comparable, Inge insists the truly difficult task is knowing what should not be compared at all. Some things are cheap precisely because they’re abundant (information, opinions, novelty); others are scarce because they require time, character, or sacrifice (trust, attention, integrity).

The sentence also contains a moral critique disguised as calm advice. “Wise man” isn’t just the clever man; it’s the person who refuses the market’s hypnosis, who won’t let popularity, urgency, or profit do the thinking. Inge’s restraint is part of the rhetorical power: no sermon, no list, just a definition that shames your misplaced priorities without naming them. The sting is that most of us don’t lack knowledge; we lack proportion.