"Patience is passion tamed"
About this Quote
“Patience is passion tamed” turns the usual moral compliment on its head. Patience isn’t portrayed as a mild, saintly temperament; it’s heat under control. Abbott’s line works because it flatters restraint without pretending restraint is effortless. It suggests the patient person isn’t empty of desire, anger, ambition, or urgency. They have plenty. They’ve just put a bridle on it.
That choice of verb, “tamed,” matters. Taming implies an animal force: natural, powerful, sometimes dangerous, and never fully “cured.” It can be trained, directed, made useful. Abbott is quietly arguing for discipline over denial. In a culture that often prizes either explosive authenticity (say what you feel, when you feel it) or rigid repression (good people don’t feel that way), he threads a third path: feel intensely, act deliberately. Patience becomes a kind of muscular virtue, not a passive one.
Abbott’s context helps. As a prominent Protestant author and public thinker in late 19th- and early 20th-century America, he lived in an era that prized self-mastery as social technology: the fuel behind reform movements, industrial “progress,” and the ethos of respectable citizenship. Read that way, the line doubles as a social instruction. Your passions can build a life or burn it down; society runs best when your inner combustion powers the engine rather than lighting the room on fire.
The subtext: patience is not slowness. It’s chosen timing.
That choice of verb, “tamed,” matters. Taming implies an animal force: natural, powerful, sometimes dangerous, and never fully “cured.” It can be trained, directed, made useful. Abbott is quietly arguing for discipline over denial. In a culture that often prizes either explosive authenticity (say what you feel, when you feel it) or rigid repression (good people don’t feel that way), he threads a third path: feel intensely, act deliberately. Patience becomes a kind of muscular virtue, not a passive one.
Abbott’s context helps. As a prominent Protestant author and public thinker in late 19th- and early 20th-century America, he lived in an era that prized self-mastery as social technology: the fuel behind reform movements, industrial “progress,” and the ethos of respectable citizenship. Read that way, the line doubles as a social instruction. Your passions can build a life or burn it down; society runs best when your inner combustion powers the engine rather than lighting the room on fire.
The subtext: patience is not slowness. It’s chosen timing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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