Daily Inspiration Quote by Saint Jerome

“Haste is of the Devil” weaponizes speed as a moral category. In Jerome’s world, time wasn’t just a resource to be optimized; it was the medium of salvation. The line lands because it turns a mundane habit - rushing - into spiritual sabotage. Not “haste leads to mistakes,” the bland self-help version, but haste as a demonic tactic: a way the soul gets separated from judgment, patience, and prayer.

Jerome’s intent is disciplinary. As an ascetic and a famously sharp-tongued polemicist, he’s not coaching you to breathe and slow down; he’s warning you that urgency is how temptation smuggles itself in. Haste is the state in which you stop discerning: you answer too quickly, desire too quickly, condemn too quickly. The Devil doesn’t need grand heresies if he can get you to skip the pause where conscience speaks.

The subtext is also about authority and control, inward and outward. Monastic life and early Christian intellectual culture depended on ordered time: reading, copying, fasting, liturgy. Jerome, translator of the Vulgate and obsessive defender of orthodoxy, knew that truth-making is slow work. Scripture is not something you “skim.” Doctrine is not something you improvise. A rushed mind becomes a porous mind.

Context matters: late antiquity was an era of theological faction, rumor, and public controversy, where reputations and communities could be whiplashed by a single letter or sermon. Jerome’s phrase is a compact counterspell against that churn. It sanctifies deliberation and makes impatience feel not merely impolite, but dangerous.