"For he who can wait, everything comes in time"
About this Quote
Patience is framed here not as a mild virtue but as a quiet form of power: the ability to wait becomes a lever that moves the world. Rabelais, a Renaissance cleric with a taste for the unruly and the human, knows exactly how scandalous that can sound in an age obsessed with providence, urgency, and moral performance. The line flatters the long game. It suggests that time is not an enemy to be beaten but an ally you can recruit, if you have the discipline to endure its pace.
The subtext is slightly barbed. Waiting is not passive; its opposite is the frantic grasping that makes people manipulable. If you cannot sit with uncertainty, you will buy certainty from whoever sells it: institutions, dogmas, charlatans, even your own worst impulses. A clergyman saying this also carries a theological echo. Christianity trains believers to live inside deferral - salvation, justice, meaning, all promised on a timetable humans dont control. The quote turns that spiritual training into a social strategy: if you can resist immediate appetites, you outlast rivals, outmaneuver panic, and let consequences ripen in your favor.
It works because it compresses a whole psychology into one calm certainty. "Everything" is an intentionally sweeping guarantee, almost suspiciously absolute, which is precisely the point: the sentence is less a factual claim than a discipline mantra. Rabelais offers patience as a counterspell to the era's volatility, and maybe to his own: in a world of doctrinal conflict and fragile reputations, sometimes survival is simply staying put long enough for the storm to pick a different target.
The subtext is slightly barbed. Waiting is not passive; its opposite is the frantic grasping that makes people manipulable. If you cannot sit with uncertainty, you will buy certainty from whoever sells it: institutions, dogmas, charlatans, even your own worst impulses. A clergyman saying this also carries a theological echo. Christianity trains believers to live inside deferral - salvation, justice, meaning, all promised on a timetable humans dont control. The quote turns that spiritual training into a social strategy: if you can resist immediate appetites, you outlast rivals, outmaneuver panic, and let consequences ripen in your favor.
It works because it compresses a whole psychology into one calm certainty. "Everything" is an intentionally sweeping guarantee, almost suspiciously absolute, which is precisely the point: the sentence is less a factual claim than a discipline mantra. Rabelais offers patience as a counterspell to the era's volatility, and maybe to his own: in a world of doctrinal conflict and fragile reputations, sometimes survival is simply staying put long enough for the storm to pick a different target.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
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