Life & Wisdom Quote by Aesop

Aesop dresses a hard-headed warning in the polite clothes of “common prudence,” but the bite is sharper than it first appears. “Affairs” here isn’t just romantic misbehavior; it’s any entanglement - a deal, a feud, a promise, a war. The word choice matters: “entrance” suggests a doorway you can step through on impulse, while “exit” implies architecture you didn’t design, corridors you can’t map once you’re inside. The sentence sets a trap for the reader’s optimism: we tend to overestimate how reversible our choices are, especially when temptation offers an easy first step.

The subtext is about asymmetry. Starting something often requires only desire; ending it requires leverage, timing, and luck. Aesop’s genius is to frame foresight not as moral purity but as practical intelligence. He’s not preaching virtue so much as exposing the hidden costs that arrive after the thrill of initiation fades: obligation, reputation, retaliation, dependency. “See our way out” is almost modern risk management - an ancient version of reading the fine print, planning an escape route, imagining the worst-case scenario before the best-case fantasy takes over.

Contextually, Aesop’s fables are built for a world where power is uneven and mistakes are expensive. For slaves, peasants, courtiers, anyone living under someone else’s whims, there’s rarely a clean exit. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth of the reset button. It’s a compact argument for autonomy: don’t enter what you can’t leave on your own terms.