Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

Kempis skewers a very old temptation with the calm precision of someone who has watched it ruin souls in real time: the thrill of reforming other people is often just vanity dressed up as virtue. “Gladly we desire” is the tell. The adverb turns moral correction into a pleasure, almost a hobby. Perfection becomes a project we can outsource, a way to feel righteous without paying the cost of change ourselves.

The line’s architecture is simple but surgical: an eager first clause, then the blunt refusal of the second. That “but” is the pivot from public ambition to private cowardice. “Other men perfect” is maximalist language, a grand mission statement; “our own fault” shrinks the task to something small, specific, and humiliating. The contrast exposes how moral energy gets misallocated: we aim at the spectacular (fixing society, fixing them) to avoid the intimate (fixing me).

Context matters. Thomas a Kempis wrote from within the devotional world of The Imitation of Christ, where the spiritual life is measured less by performance and more by inner discipline, confession, and humility. In that tradition, the desire to correct others can be a spiritual decoy, a way for pride to survive under religious cover. The subtext is not anti-accountability; it’s anti-theater. Kempis isn’t condemning moral standards, he’s condemning the loophole that lets us preach self-denial while practicing self-exemption.

Read now, it lands as a critique of our favorite modern pastime: righteous commentary. The call is unglamorous and therefore radical: stop auditioning as judge, start as witness.