Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Dekker

Dekker lands a compliment that curdles into an indictment. “We are ne’er like angels till our passion dies” flatters the fantasy that purity is possible, then snaps it shut: the only time humans resemble angels is when the animating force has gone out of them. In a single line, he makes “angelic” less a moral achievement than a postscript.

The phrasing does a lot of covert work. “Ne’er” isn’t just emphasis; it’s a verdict on the living. And “till” makes holiness a deadline, not a practice. Passion here isn’t merely lust; in early modern drama it’s the whole messy engine of appetite, ambition, jealousy, faith, rage - the fuel that produces both sin and art. Dekker’s theater was crowded with apprentices, merchants, and hustlers in a rapidly commercializing London, a city where desire was not an abstract vice but the daily weather. In that context, the line reads like a wry aside from someone who knows that sermons about angelhood tend to ignore how people actually survive.

The subtext is bracingly unsentimental: if you demand saintliness, you’re asking for numbness, resignation, maybe death. Dekker isn’t necessarily celebrating passion as noble; he’s exposing the bargain behind moral purity when it’s defined as the absence of intensity. The sting is that the “angel” ideal becomes a way to shame the human condition - and a way, conveniently, to quiet it.