Daily Inspiration Quote by John Henry Newman

Newman is doing a neat bit of moral judo: he grants the attractive sales pitch of goodness (virtue feels good), then flips it to expose how easily that pitch curdles into vanity. The line works because it refuses the modern bargain-basement spirituality where ethics is a wellness plan and holiness is a mood. Yes, virtue brings pleasure, he concedes, but the moment pleasure becomes the motive, you have changed the thing you are pursuing. You are no longer aiming at the good; you are aiming at yourself.

The subtext is suspicious of instrumental religion. Newman is writing out of a 19th-century Christian world where faith is under pressure from utilitarian moral reasoning and a rising culture of respectability: be decent, be rewarded, feel superior. His warning is that this logic doesn’t merely cheapen virtue; it makes virtue impossible. If the inner calculus is “I’ll be good so I can get the good feeling,” the self becomes the project, and virtue becomes a technique.

That paradox - you lose the very pleasure you’re chasing - is the rhetorical engine here. Newman treats virtue as something like love or integrity: it can’t survive being handled as a transaction. The “never” lands like a theological dare. Religious life, he implies, isn’t a hack for happiness; it’s an orientation away from the self, and the pleasure that comes with it is real precisely because it isn’t the point.