Daily Inspiration Quote by David Brainerd

Brainerd’s line is a spiritual hand grenade lobbed into the 18th-century prestige economy: the idea that the pleasures attached to “greatness, riches, honours” don’t merely distract you from God, they actively corrode you. The provocation is the word “infinitely.” He’s not offering a mild warning about excess. He’s insisting that certain comforts are more dangerous than deprivation because they counterfeit satisfaction. Nothing is easier to repent of than hunger; plenty persuades you you’re fine.

The phrasing piles up public and private lures in one breath - status (“greatness”), money (“riches”), social validation (“honours”), and bodily appetite (“sensual gratifications”). That range matters. Brainerd isn’t only suspicious of the obvious sins; he’s suspicious of the respectable ones, the socially rewarded forms of self-love that can be baptized as “success.” The subtext is an early Protestant psychology: the heart is an expert at self-justification, and worldly reward is its favorite evidence.

Context sharpens the intent. Brainerd was a Calvinist missionary and diarist formed by revivalist intensity and a constant rehearsal of mortality; he died at 29. In that frame, “worldly pleasures” aren’t neutral experiences you merely enjoy responsibly. They are rival liturgies - practices that train desire away from eternity and toward the self. Saying they’re “worse than none” is strategic extremism: poverty may hurt, but it can also clarify; prosperity dulls the senses, makes repentance feel unnecessary, and turns ambition into a moral anesthetic.