Nature & Animals Quote by Thomas Fuller

Passion, in Fuller’s image, isn’t the horse; it’s the rider’s mistake about control. The sentence lands because it borrows the posture of mastery - a man on horseback - then flips it into panic. You think you’re directing the animal; you’re actually being carried wherever it bolts. That reversal is the point: passion feels like power while it quietly converts you into cargo.

As a 17th-century English clergyman, Fuller is writing from a culture obsessed with self-government: of the soul, the household, the nation. His metaphor echoes a world where horses were daily technology and status symbol, and where a runaway mount meant real injury, public humiliation, even death. The practical danger gives the moral warning teeth. He’s not diagnosing emotion as evil so much as describing its physics: once momentum takes over, intention becomes decoration.

The subtext is theological but not precious. Passion here signals any heat that outruns judgment - lust, anger, ambition, righteous fury. Fuller’s clerical angle frames these as temptations that impersonate necessity. You tell yourself you had to say it, had to do it, had to chase it. The horse “runs away with him” absolves and indicts at once: you’re not in control now, but you chose to climb on.

The line also warns against the flattering myth of authenticity: that the truest self is the most intense self. Fuller insists the opposite. A self ruled by passion isn’t more honest; it’s simply less free.