Life & Wisdom Quote by Hesiod

Karma, before it got merchandised into a bumper sticker, looks like this: a blunt, almost legalistic warning from Hesiod that harm is self-harm with a delay. The line works because it refuses the comforting fantasy that evil is a tool you can wield cleanly, like a knife held at arm's length. In Hesiod's moral universe, wrongdoing is not just a breach of etiquette or a sin tallied in the heavens; it's a kind of craft project. "He fashions" is the tell. Evil isn't an accident. It's made, shaped, practiced, internalized. The maker becomes the material.

The second clause sharpens the threat: an "evil plan" rebounds not through mystical fate but through mischief that is structurally baked into plotting. Schemes require paranoia, secrecy, and a steady willingness to dehumanize; those habits rot the planner's judgment and relationships. Even if the plan "works", it trains you to live in a world where everyone is a mark, which is its own punishment.

Context matters. Hesiod is writing in archaic Greece, where justice (dike) is imagined as both social order and cosmic principle. His audience includes small landholders and local elites in a society anxious about corruption, predation, and the abuse of power. The subtext is political: you can cheat your neighbor, rig the scales, bribe the judge, but you are also eroding the very norms that keep your own life stable. It's a warning dressed as wisdom: the moment you treat other people as expendable, you start building the kind of world that will eventually come for you.