Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Forgetting here isn’t a failure of memory; it’s a performance of will, polished into a moral pose. Sheridan gives us a speaker who treats amnesia as a tidy household chore: "set about it" makes grief sound like paperwork, something you can clear off the desk if you apply yourself. The punchline is the sanctimony. "I thought it my duty" turns emotional abandonment into virtue, a rhetorical trick that lets cruelty pass as character.

As a playwright, Sheridan knows exactly how to make hypocrisy sparkle. The line’s rhythm escalates from the breezy generalization ("nothing on earth so easy") to the brutal specificity ("your poor, dear uncle") and then lands on the most damning word in the sentence: "duty". That final claim reframes the whole confession, revealing its real function: to preempt judgment. The speaker isn’t confessing; they’re establishing social terms. If forgetting is duty, then remembering becomes indulgence, even indecency.

The subtext is class and self-preservation. In Sheridan’s comic world, people survive by curating their feelings as aggressively as their reputations. Affection is deployable language ("poor, dear") rather than a binding commitment, and the dead can be written out when they become inconvenient to the living. The joke cuts because it’s plausible: we recognize the social type who weaponizes propriety to justify callousness. Sheridan’s wit isn’t merely decorative; it’s diagnostic, catching a culture where moral vocabulary is elastic enough to excuse almost anything, especially the decision to move on.