Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine is doing two things at once: pushing responsibility inward and laundering praise of others into a kind of self-discipline. The line about endeavor "rest[ing] wholly upon yourself" sounds like moral encouragement, but it also carries Paine's revolutionary suspicion of inherited status. Virtue, for him, is not a decorative badge pinned on by church, crown, or reputation; it's a practice earned in the grit of choosing and acting. That is pure Enlightenment moral psychology, with a political edge: if character is made, then authority should be accountable, not automatic.

The clever pivot comes in the second half. Praising others is usually a social gesture, even a submissive one. Paine reframes it as a tool for self-governance: admire someone and you have quietly set a standard you now feel compelled to meet. Compliment becomes commitment. Subtext: the safest moral pedagogy isn't being preached at; it's watching competence and courage in the wild, then feeling the internal sting of "I could do that too."

Context matters. Paine wrote to mobilize ordinary people against the thick fog of deference. In that world, moral language was often used to keep people in their place. Here, virtue is democratized and weaponized: no excuses, no priestly intermediaries, no aristocratic alibis. Even your praise is supposed to make you more dangerous to complacency. It's motivational, yes, but also anti-authoritarian: the point of celebrating virtue isn't to create idols; it's to manufacture more citizens capable of it.