Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Johnson

Cruelty, Johnson implies, is often less a moral choice than a symptom: misery curdles the instincts that make kindness feel natural. "The wretched have no compassion" is deliberately bracing, almost prosecutorial, because it refuses a comforting story that suffering automatically ennobles. He’s arguing the opposite: deprivation narrows the imagination, makes other people’s pain feel like competition, not kinship. That’s a bleak view of human nature, but it’s also an ethical provocation aimed at the comfortable reader who romanticizes hardship from a safe distance.

The second clause does the real work. If the wretched "can do good only from strong principles of duty", then goodness becomes less an emotion than a discipline. Johnson, a deeply moral writer shaped by Christian ethics and a lifetime of financial strain and melancholia, is outlining a theory of virtue that doesn’t depend on mood. Compassion is unreliable when you’re hungry, ashamed, exhausted. Duty - internalized, almost muscle-memory - can still operate when empathy is offline.

Subtextually, it’s both a warning and a demand. Don’t expect the poor to be saints; build a society that doesn’t force people into moral triage. And if you yourself are suffering, don’t wait to "feel" generous. Act from principle. Johnson’s line has the sting of lived experience: he’s not flattering the downtrodden, he’s respecting them enough to say virtue under pressure is hard - and therefore requires structure, habit, and obligations that outlast sentiment.