Daily Inspiration Quote by Terence

A Roman comic playwright preaching moderation is already a small joke: the man who made a living exaggerating human appetite turns around and warns you not to fall in love with your own indulgences. Terence’s line lands because it’s framed as a “principle rule,” then immediately undercut by the modesty of “I take it to be” and the almost clinical “addicted.” It’s a moral maxim delivered with the shrug of someone who’s watched too many people swear they’re in control right up until the moment they aren’t.

The specific intent isn’t ascetic purity; it’s practical self-management. “Any one thing” is the key. Terence isn’t singling out sex, wine, money, ambition, or ideology. He’s diagnosing the human tendency to narrow a life into a single obsession and call it identity. That breadth gives the line its durability: it reads as advice about pleasure, but also about status, certainty, and the seductive comfort of being a one-note person.

Context matters. Terence wrote in the mid-Republic, adapting Greek New Comedy for a Roman audience that prized self-control as civic virtue while living in a society lubricated by spectacle, conquest, and competition. His plays thrive on characters hijacked by fixation: the lover, the miser, the strict father. The subtext is almost diagnostic: addiction isn’t a special category; it’s what happens when a harmless preference turns into a governing principle. The wit is that he offers a rule against rules becoming too rule-like.