Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter De Vries

A lesser writer would build a moral out of suspicion; Peter De Vries flips it into a rescue mission. The line pivots on a sly pun: "see through" can mean both penetrating insight and dismissive transparency, as if other people are just puzzles to solve or facades to unmask. De Vries, a novelist with a satirist's ear for social cruelty, suggests that our cult of discernment can become a kind of sanctioned contempt. When the goal is to "see through" someone, you end up treating them as an object - a con, a type, a diagnosis - and the reward is the private thrill of being smarter than they are.

The second clause lands like a corrective that doesn't sound pious because it's grammatically inseparable from the first. "To see one another through" shifts vision from surveillance to accompaniment: not the X-ray gaze that exposes, but the steady gaze that stays. The intent is quietly anti-modern in the best way. It pushes back against the default posture of irony, the reflex to decode motives, the social-media sport of calling people out as fake. De Vries isn't arguing for naivete; he's arguing that interpersonal clarity without loyalty is just another way to leave.

Context matters, too: coming out of a midcentury American literary world steeped in religious and moral debate, De Vries makes compassion sound like a practical ethic rather than a sermon. The brilliance is that the joke - the wordplay - smuggles in the demand: less judgment-as-entertainment, more stamina.