Daily Inspiration Quote by John Tillotson

Self-control gets framed here not as a saintly personality trait but as evidence: a public-facing argument that you possess reason, and beyond that, a mind large enough to swallow insult without needing to spit it back. Tillotson is doing something shrewdly pastoral. He takes a messy, volatile social reality provocation, pride, retaliation and recasts restraint as intellectual competence. “To bear provocation” isn’t passive weakness; it’s proof you can govern yourself when someone else tries to govern your emotions.

The second clause raises the stakes. Endurance is “great reason,” but forgiveness is “a great mind” a leap from logic to moral imagination. Forgiveness requires not just resisting the impulse to strike back, but reinterpreting the offender: seeing beyond the immediate injury to the human limitations beneath it. That’s why it’s “great”: it demands inner spaciousness, a willingness to absorb humiliation without making it your identity.

Context matters. As a late-17th-century Anglican divine and later Archbishop of Canterbury, Tillotson wrote in a culture of brittle honor, factional politics, and religious conflict where slights could escalate into vendettas or sermons turned into score-settling. His intent is social engineering through virtue: promote a temperament suited to civil life after upheaval. Subtext: the truly powerful person is the one who can afford not to retaliate. Reason becomes a kind of armor; forgiveness, a kind of authority.