Life & Wisdom Quote by Grenville Kleiser

Kleiser’s line sells self-mastery the way early-20th-century America sold everything: with a training plan. The comparison to muscles is doing quiet propaganda work. It smuggles in the promise that judgment, often treated as a mysterious gift or a social privilege, can be manufactured through routine. That’s an egalitarian pitch on the surface: anyone can build this capacity. Underneath, it also flatters a certain modern anxiety - the fear of being improvisational in a world increasingly organized by systems, schedules, and performance metrics.

The key word is “judicious,” a neat little self-referential wink. You develop judgment by… being judicious. It’s almost circular, but productively so, because it implies a feedback loop: small choices sharpen the instrument that makes the next choice. Kleiser isn’t offering a single dramatic epiphany; he’s arguing for compound interest in character. That’s why “daily” matters. The quote is less about moral virtue than about habit formation, a proto-productivity ethic before the term existed.

Context matters: Kleiser made his name in self-improvement, rhetoric, and oratory manuals, part of a broader era obsessed with efficiency, discipline, and “character” as a DIY project. The subtext is social mobility with a stern face: if judgment is trainable, then poor decisions are, at least partly, a failure of practice. It’s empowering, but it also quietly shifts responsibility onto the individual - a classic self-help move that still echoes in today’s hustle culture, where every flaw becomes a skill gap waiting for drills.