Life & Wisdom Quote by Gerald Massey

Massey flips the usual Victorian lament on its head: the world isn’t starved of goodness, we’re just catastrophically bad at recognizing it. The line lands because it refuses the comforting story that cruelty is inevitable or kindness is rare. Instead, it indicts perception itself. “Dearth” sounds economic, almost statistical, as if kindness is a resource we could measure and ration. Massey’s answer is sharper: the shortage is not supply, it’s sight.

“Only in our blindness” is doing the heavy moral work. Blindness isn’t ignorance in the abstract; it’s willful mis-seeing, the kind that lets grievance feel like discernment. Then comes the tactile sting: “we gather thorns for flowers.” The verb “gather” matters. This isn’t an accident. It’s an act of selection, even preference - the human tendency to curate pain as proof of sophistication, to mistake cynicism for clarity, to hoard slights while ignoring gestures of care. Massey implies a perverse competence: we’re active, organized, even industrious in our negativity.

Context helps. Massey rose from child labor and radical politics into poetry; he wrote in an era thick with industrial hardship and moral preaching. Against a backdrop where suffering could be treated as destiny or divine lesson, these lines argue for agency. The subtext is almost proto-psychological: the world’s moral weather may be mixed, but our interpretive habits decide what we carry home. Kindness is there, unglamorous and abundant - unless we insist on coming back with bleeding hands.