Free Will & Fate Quote by William Drummond

Drummond’s sentence tightens like a theological knot: you didn’t choose to be born, so don’t pretend you can author your own exit. The line works because it begins with a plain, almost commonsense observation about human powerlessness, then pivots into a moral rebuke. It’s not merely resignation; it’s an assault on the fantasy of sovereignty. “Presume” is doing heavy lifting here, casting the desire to control death not as bravery but as arrogance.

The subtext is a disciplined kind of humility, the sort that doesn’t flatter the self with “my life, my choice” rhetoric. Instead, Drummond offers an austere corrective: the only acceptable will is calibrated to God’s. “Soberly” signals the emotional register he’s after: no melodrama, no romance of self-destruction, no heroic styling of one’s departure. Just a steady, devotional recalibration of desire.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in early modern Christian ethics, where providence is the deep grammar of experience and death is a domain claimed by God. Drummond, a Scottish poet of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, wrote in a culture steeped in Calvinist seriousness and frequent encounters with mortality (illness, war, unstable politics). Read that way, the quote isn’t a vague piety; it’s social instruction. It polices the boundary between faithful endurance and self-authorized escape, insisting that the ultimate act of agency is paradoxically the surrender of agency: “learn to will which He wills.”