"It is with our passions as it is with fire and water, they are good servants, but bad masters"
About this Quote
Aesop’s line lands with the clean snap of a fable: it domesticates something terrifying. Fire and water are not “bad” in themselves; they cook food, warm homes, irrigate fields, carry ships. But the moment they stop being contained, they stop being tools and start being forces. That’s the intent hiding behind the simplicity: passions are necessary energies, not moral stains, yet they demand infrastructure - boundaries, habits, judgment - the way a hearth demands a stone ring and a bucket line.
The subtext is quietly political. Aesop wrote for a world that prized self-command as survival technology, especially for people with little formal power. If you can’t control the external order, you learn to police the internal one. The “servant/master” metaphor borrows the most legible hierarchy of the ancient household to make an argument about sovereignty: the self should rule the self. Once anger, desire, envy, or pride takes the throne, you don’t become “more authentic,” you become governed.
The brilliance is how the comparison refuses melodrama. Fire and water are everyday elements; that ordinariness is the warning. Disaster rarely announces itself as Evil. It begins as heat you wanted, thirst you needed, momentum you enjoyed. Aesop isn’t asking readers to extinguish passion; he’s insisting they build a container for it, because the same force that animates a life can also burn it down or drown it out.
The subtext is quietly political. Aesop wrote for a world that prized self-command as survival technology, especially for people with little formal power. If you can’t control the external order, you learn to police the internal one. The “servant/master” metaphor borrows the most legible hierarchy of the ancient household to make an argument about sovereignty: the self should rule the self. Once anger, desire, envy, or pride takes the throne, you don’t become “more authentic,” you become governed.
The brilliance is how the comparison refuses melodrama. Fire and water are everyday elements; that ordinariness is the warning. Disaster rarely announces itself as Evil. It begins as heat you wanted, thirst you needed, momentum you enjoyed. Aesop isn’t asking readers to extinguish passion; he’s insisting they build a container for it, because the same force that animates a life can also burn it down or drown it out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to Aesop — listed on Wikiquote (Aesop): "It is with our passions as it is with fire and water; they are good servants, but bad masters." |
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