Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas W. Higginson

A good idea, Higginson suggests, doesn’t merely persuade; it disrupts the body. “Takes one’s breath away” frames thought as an experience with physical stakes, the kind of sudden clarity or beauty that stops your lungs for a second. Against that visceral jolt, “a grammar lesson” isn’t just irrelevant, it’s an “impertinence” - a social offense, a small rudeness performed in the name of propriety.

The line works because it dramatizes a familiar cultural clash: the rule-keepers versus the rapt. Higginson, a clergyman in a 19th-century America obsessed with cultivation and correctness, is implicitly defending awe and moral imagination against pedantry. He’s not dismissing grammar as useless; he’s attacking the impulse to police form at the moment when content is doing its highest work. That’s the subtext: correction can be a way of avoiding being moved. If you can nitpick a sentence, you don’t have to reckon with what it’s trying to say.

There’s also a spiritual edge. Clergy trade in experiences that exceed ordinary language - revelation, conviction, grace, terror. In that light, grammar becomes a stand-in for any institutional reflex to domesticate the ineffable. Higginson’s wit is in the disproportion: an earthshaking thought arrives, and someone reaches for the red pen. The sentence quietly argues that reverence sometimes looks like letting the moment stay messy long enough to matter.