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Life & Wisdom Quote by Euripides

"Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account"

About this Quote

Fatalism, in Euripides, is never a cozy blanket. It is a survival skill for people living under gods, wars, and city-state politics that treat individual desire like disposable theater props. “Events will take their course” reads at first like resignation, but the line’s real move is sharper: it separates raw feeling from strategic agency. Anger is framed as an indulgence, not a protest with teeth. The world won’t be shamed into changing, so rage becomes wasted heat.

The subtext is almost managerial in its chill. Euripides isn’t telling you to stop caring; he’s telling you that outrage is often a way of clinging to the fantasy that you were owed a different timeline. In tragedy, characters destroy themselves not because they suffer misfortune, but because they insist the universe negotiate. The happiest person here isn’t the luckiest or most virtuous; it’s the one who can metabolize disaster into advantage, who treats circumstance as material rather than insult.

Context matters: Euripides wrote in an Athens that watched its certainties crumble - plague, imperial overreach, bitter civic conflict. His plays repeatedly interrogate the gap between human plans and what arrives anyway. This line offers a hard-edged ethic for that environment: not serenity, but adaptive intelligence. It’s proto-Stoic without the later philosophy’s polished calm; it still tastes like stage dust and aftermath. Wisdom, for Euripides, is less about mastering fate than refusing to let fate master your inner life.

Quote Details

TopicWisdom
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Euripides. (2026, January 15). Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/events-will-take-their-course-it-is-no-good-of-68169/

Chicago Style
Euripides. "Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/events-will-take-their-course-it-is-no-good-of-68169/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/events-will-take-their-course-it-is-no-good-of-68169/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

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Euripides

Euripides (480 BC - 406 BC) was a Poet from Greece.

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