Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Fuller’s line slices through a social illusion that still feels painfully current: abundance of people, famine of loyalty. The balance of the sentence does the work. “Scarcity” is a word you’d use for grain or money, not affection, which quietly reframes friendship as a resource that can be hoarded, counterfeited, or squandered. Then comes the pivot - “but not of friends” - a deliberately cheapened term, as if Fuller is warning that the label is easy to mass-produce while the substance remains rare.

As a 17th-century clergyman writing amid civil war, shifting allegiances, and the careerist churn of court and parish, Fuller would have watched “friend” become a political convenience. The subtext is moral and practical at once: companionship is plentiful when it costs nothing; friendship is scarce because it demands constancy, risk, and some willingness to lose status. In a world where public piety could be performative and loyalties were tested by faction, he’s calling out the soft corruption of social life - the tendency to confuse sociability with trust.

The line also smuggles in a spiritual critique. Friendship, for Fuller, isn’t networking; it’s a discipline. The scarcity isn’t accidental, it’s diagnostic: it measures how reluctant people are to practice the harder virtues (patience, honesty, forgiveness) when easier substitutes are available. It’s a compact piece of pastoral realism, suspicious of crowds and protective of the few relationships sturdy enough to survive weather.