Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson is poking at a contradiction polite society prefers to deny: people rarely need to be taught humility. Pride is already doing the teaching, just in costume. By calling it "a pride, a self-love" lodged in "human minds", he frames ego not as a moral defect some people have, but as an operating system everyone runs. The sly twist is the phrase "seldom be kept so low" - as if pride were a furnace you could damp down. You can try, through religion, manners, shame, or social rank, to press it into silence. It almost never stays there.

The real bite comes in the final clause: "humbler than they ought to be". Richardson isn't celebrating arrogance; he's warning against a cultural habit of overcorrecting. Eighteenth-century Britain was thick with hierarchies and moral instruction: sermons on modesty, conduct books, the constant policing of women's "virtue" and servants' deference. In that world, humility isn't just a personal virtue; it's a social technology used to keep certain people in their place. Richardson, a novelist obsessed with interior life and social pressure, suggests a limit to how effective that technology can be. There is a floor beneath which self-respect won't reliably sink.

The subtext is a defense of human dignity disguised as a comment on vanity. Pride, he implies, is not merely noisy entitlement; it's also the stubborn minimum of selfhood that resists being bullied into spiritual and social diminishment. The line works because it sounds like a moral admonition while quietly refusing moralistic cruelty.