Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Self-mastery is pitched here as domestic policy: conquer yourself first, then your household will fall into line. Fuller, a 17th-century English cleric writing in a culture that treated marriage as a miniature commonwealth, frames the home in the political language of the era: conquest, governance, rule. That word choice isn’t accidental. It flatters the male reader’s sense of authority while also sneaking in a pastoral warning that tyrants who can’t govern their appetites make lousy heads of families.

The subtext runs in two directions at once. On the surface, it reasserts patriarchal hierarchy: the wife is someone to be “governed,” not a co-equal partner. Yet Fuller’s conditional (“first get”) quietly shifts the burden onto the husband. If your marriage is chaotic, the problem may be your temper, pride, libido, or vanity. “Absolute conquest” is Puritan-adjacent discipline: an inner battle against sin before you start managing anyone else’s behavior. It’s advice that sounds like a power grab but functions as a check on male impulsiveness.

The line also reveals how religion laundered control as virtue. A clergyman can’t openly endorse brute domination; he has to moralize it. So governance becomes “easy” not because the wife is weak, but because the husband’s corrected character will supposedly produce harmony. That’s the rhetorical trick: marital authority is justified as the downstream effect of personal holiness, turning self-improvement into a license to lead.