Daily Inspiration Quote by John Churton Collins

Advice, Collins suggests, is often a disguised audition for praise. The line lands because it’s not really about counsel; it’s about vanity and the quiet choreography of social life. “To ask advice” sounds humble, even virtuous, but he yanks the mask off: in “nine cases out of ten” we’re not seeking correction, we’re shopping for confirmation. The verb choice is the tell. “Tout” carries the whiff of hustling and self-advertisement, turning the seeker into a barker outside their own ego, angling for the right respondent who will sell them the story they already want to believe.

As a late-Victorian critic, Collins wrote in a culture where manners and deference were both currency and camouflage. Advice was one of the sanctioned ways to talk about yourself without seeming to. By framing it as flattery-seeking, he exposes a social loophole: the question is merely a pretext to center the asker, and the adviser is cast as a prop in a performance of modesty. The cynicism isn’t just misanthropic; it’s diagnostic. Collins is pointing at a conversational economy in which sincerity is risky and self-knowledge even riskier, so people outsource self-approval to an “objective” voice.

The sting is that he’s indicting the listener too. Flattery requires collaboration. The adviser who delivers it gets to feel wise; the asker gets to feel validated. Collins compresses that mutual transaction into one crisp, suspicious statistic, the kind critics love: precise enough to sound empirical, ruthless enough to feel true.