Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

“Much safer” is the tell: Thomas a Kempis isn’t admiring obedience as a noble ideal so much as recommending it as spiritual risk management. In the late medieval Christian imagination, power isn’t just a temptation; it’s a liability. To rule is to invite vanity, cruelty disguised as necessity, and the seductive belief that outcomes justify means. Obedience, by contrast, narrows the moral surface area. Fewer decisions, fewer excuses, fewer opportunities to mistake ego for duty.

The line also smuggles in a quiet, bracing theory of responsibility. Rulers don’t merely act; they authorize. Their choices ripple outward, multiplying harm as efficiently as they can multiply good. In that sense, “safer” points to judgment: the more people you command, the more souls you endanger, including your own. The warning is sharpened by Kempis’s monastic context, where obedience isn’t passive submission but a practiced discipline, a way of sanding down the self until it stops demanding the world rearrange around it.

There’s a subversive edge here, too. By framing obedience as the prudent option, Kempis punctures the glamour of leadership centuries before we got our TED-talk cult of the “visionary.” He’s not saying authority is always illegitimate; he’s saying it’s spiritually radioactive. If you must rule, do it with fear and trembling. If you can avoid it, don’t confuse the throne with virtue.