Life & Wisdom Quote by Euripides

Euripides doesn’t romanticize love here; he disciplines it. The line lands like a commandment, not a sonnet: get on your knees, give thanks, and do it fasting. That triple demand turns “a good man’s love” into something closer to a rare civic resource than a private thrill. In a world where women’s security could hinge on one household’s temper, affection from a decent man isn’t a cute bonus; it’s protection, status, and survival. Gratitude becomes less etiquette than strategy.

The phrasing also carries a sting. Euripides loved exposing how easily societies talk about virtue while trapping people inside unequal bargains. “Thank heaven” frames male goodness as a kind of divine weather: you don’t earn it, you’re spared or struck. The fasting matters because it strips away indulgence; you’re asked to approach love like a ritual offering, not consumption. That’s reverence, but it’s also an indictment of how scarce decency is. If you must fast to be worthy of basic kindness, something is rotten in the moral economy.

Euripides’ theater regularly put women, foreigners, and the powerless at the center, then let polite ideals clash with brute reality. Read in that light, the line can be sincere prayer and dark critique at once. It flatters the “good man,” but it also implies how terrifying the alternative is: if goodness were common, no one would need to beg the gods for it.