Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

Pragmatism dressed as piety: "Of two evils, the less is always to be chosen" is a moral safety rail for moments when purity is impossible. Thomas a Kempis, the devotional writer behind The Imitation of Christ, isn’t flirting with cynicism so much as conceding the messy physics of human life. Sin, temptation, compromise, obligation: these are not abstract chess problems in his world. They are daily frictions for a believer trying to live cleanly inside a fallen reality.

The line works because it refuses the comforting fantasy of a third option. It doesn’t promise rescue; it offers triage. The intent is pastoral and corrective: don’t let the desire to be perfectly good become an excuse to do something worse. That subtext matters. A scrupulous conscience can turn indecision into a kind of vanity, a performance of righteousness that leaves real harm untouched. Kempis cuts through that by shifting the measure from self-image to consequence.

Contextually, this comes from a late medieval Christian culture obsessed with moral accounting, where the difference between "avoidable" and "unavoidable" wrongdoing shaped confession, penance, and daily conduct. Read that way, the quote is less a permission slip than a constraint: if you must choose, choose what minimizes damage to your soul and to others. It’s an ethic of limited liability for imperfect people, and its durability comes from how bluntly it names the thing we’d rather deny: sometimes "good" isn’t available, only "less bad."