Daily Inspiration Quote by David Seabury

Desire is the con artist in Seabury's sentence: it doesn’t just want things, it rigs the game so you can’t tell wanting from knowing. “Blind man’s bluff” is a sly choice because it’s not simple blindness; it’s a social performance where everyone pretends the rules are fair while the blindfolded player gropes for truth by touch and rumor. Seabury’s intent is diagnostic, not poetic: he’s warning that the mind’s most confident declarations (“I really believe...”) are often wish-fulfillment wearing the costume of conviction.

The subtext is that introspection is unreliable when it’s unstructured. “Your desires and true beliefs” are paired as if they’re equally in play, equally capable of deception. That’s the trap. We like to think desires distort beliefs from the outside, like static on a signal. Seabury suggests the distortion is internal and interactive: belief can be recruited to protect desire, and desire can masquerade as belief until you’re defending it like a principle.

“Corner the inner facts” shifts from parlor game to interrogation room. Facts don’t volunteer; they evade. To “corner” them implies method, pressure, and an unwillingness to accept the first story your psyche offers. In Seabury’s early-20th-century psychological climate - part self-help moralism, part emerging clinical realism - the line reads as a call for disciplined self-examination: not navel-gazing, but evidence gathering. The real target isn’t confusion; it’s self-justification, the habit of turning private appetite into public reason.