"If you cannot mould yourself entirely as you would wish, how can you expect other people to be entirely to your liking?"
About this Quote
Self-mastery is the bar Thomas a Kempis quietly sets before anyone is allowed the luxury of judging others. The sentence has the clean, chastening logic of devotional literature: before you curate the world, try curating the self. a Kempis, a 15th-century Christian writer best known for The Imitation of Christ, isn’t offering a trendy self-help maxim so much as a spiritual corrective aimed at pride, that evergreen temptation to treat other people as raw material for our preferences.
The intent is almost prosecutorial. If you can’t even “mould” yourself - with full access to your own motives, habits, and private negotiations - what arrogance lets you think you can demand that strangers and loved ones align perfectly with your taste? The subtext: the dissatisfaction you project outward is often the same restlessness you refuse to face inward. In that way, the line doubles as a diagnostic tool. Your irritation becomes evidence, not of other people’s failure, but of your own unworked contradictions.
Its rhetorical power comes from a sly reversal of expectation. Most moral advice lectures you about being kinder; this one traps you with your own standards. It also punctures the fantasy of total control: “entirely” appears twice, like a mirror held up to perfectionism. a Kempis is arguing that the desire for people “entirely to your liking” is itself disordered - a wish for a frictionless human world, which is another name for idolatry of the self.
Read in context, it’s less about lowering standards than about relocating them: from the impossible task of managing others to the harder, holier work of managing your own heart.
The intent is almost prosecutorial. If you can’t even “mould” yourself - with full access to your own motives, habits, and private negotiations - what arrogance lets you think you can demand that strangers and loved ones align perfectly with your taste? The subtext: the dissatisfaction you project outward is often the same restlessness you refuse to face inward. In that way, the line doubles as a diagnostic tool. Your irritation becomes evidence, not of other people’s failure, but of your own unworked contradictions.
Its rhetorical power comes from a sly reversal of expectation. Most moral advice lectures you about being kinder; this one traps you with your own standards. It also punctures the fantasy of total control: “entirely” appears twice, like a mirror held up to perfectionism. a Kempis is arguing that the desire for people “entirely to your liking” is itself disordered - a wish for a frictionless human world, which is another name for idolatry of the self.
Read in context, it’s less about lowering standards than about relocating them: from the impossible task of managing others to the harder, holier work of managing your own heart.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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