Parenting & Family Quote by Thomas Willis

Willis turns the era's favorite boogeyman - Fortune, that fickle goddess of status, money, and survival - into something almost manageable. The line reads like paternal advice, but it also carries the hard-earned pragmatism of a 17th-century life where plague, civil war, and political whiplash could wipe out security overnight. You can hear an anxious parent bargaining with chaos: if my children can control nothing else, let them control themselves.

The craft is in the moral pivot. "Just and virtuous" isn’t only piety; it’s reputational armor. Willis welds ethics to social standing with the blunt phrase "never to disgrace my name or theirs". In a world where family identity functioned like credit, disgrace was a kind of economic and political injury. Virtue becomes inheritance, not merely aspiration: a portable asset that can’t be confiscated by a bad harvest or a hostile regime.

Then comes the rhetorical trick: "out of fortune's power". He doesn’t claim virtue prevents misfortune; he implies it shrinks Fortune’s jurisdiction. Lose money, office, even safety - still, the core claim is that character keeps you from being fully owned by circumstances. For a scientist-physician like Willis, that’s telling. Medicine confronted randomness daily, yet it also tried to map it, to impose pattern on suffering. This sentence performs a similar operation in miniature: it offers a method for resisting contingency without pretending contingency disappears.