Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Richardson

The line lands like a moral truth delivered with a novelist's cold eye: empathy, taken to its logical extreme, would break the machinery of living. Richardson isn't praising selfishness so much as admitting a grim design constraint of human psychology. The word "supporting" does double duty. It's about sustaining life biologically (you'd freeze in place from overload) and supporting it socially (you'd be too emotionally spent to function as spouse, parent, worker, citizen). That small pivot turns sentiment into systems thinking.

"Poignantly" is the knife. Richardson doesn't imagine a mild sympathy deficit; he imagines what it would mean to feel other people's pain with the same immediate, bodily urgency as our own. His claim is that self-preference isn't a vice we can simply will away; it's a protective insulation that makes action possible. Without it, attention becomes an unpayable debt. Every stranger's grief would demand the kind of response reserved for a wounded limb.

As an 18th-century novelist of sensibility, Richardson is also winking at his era's fetish for refined feeling. His fiction traded on tears, virtue tested under pressure, the moral theater of private suffering. This sentence quietly disciplines that culture: yes, feeling is ethically valuable, but saturation is paralyzing. The subtext is almost clinical: morality requires triage. We do not ignore others because we're monsters; we ration intensity because constant full-strength compassion would collapse the self that compassion needs in order to act.