Love Quote by Hugh Blair

Blair’s line is a neat piece of Protestant psychology dressed up as moral advice: purification isn’t framed as loss or deprivation, but as strength training. In a culture where “purity” can sound like fragile innocence, he flips it into something muscular. The heart, in Blair’s usage, isn’t a Valentine organ; it’s the seat of will, appetite, and character. To purify it is to clear out the clutter that makes a person porous to vanity, envy, resentment, and distraction. The payoff is fortification: a sturdier inner life that can hold steady under pressure.

The subtext is pastoral and tactical. Blair is writing in an 18th-century moral ecosystem shaped by sermons, polite society, and the emerging language of “sensibility.” People are anxious about appearing virtuous while being quietly undone by their impulses. Blair’s solution isn’t spectacle or status, but interior discipline. Notice the practical causality in “also”: he’s telling his audience that self-examination, repentance, and restraint aren’t merely spiritual hygiene; they are the mechanism by which you become harder to manipulate, less reactive, more coherent.

It’s also an argument against the common excuse that moral seriousness makes you bleak or brittle. Blair insists the opposite: the cleaner the motives, the stronger the person. Purity here isn’t about being untouched; it’s about being unbribable.