Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

Purity and simplicity aren’t offered here as quaint virtues; they’re engineered as lift. Thomas a Kempis, the devotional writer behind The Imitation of Christ, turns moral language into a physics metaphor: the soul has weight, the world has drag, and only a certain kind of inner discipline gets you airborne. “Two wings” is doing quiet rhetorical work. One wing alone won’t fly. Purity without simplicity curdles into anxious moral bookkeeping; simplicity without purity becomes minimalism as aesthetic, a lifestyle brand that still leaves the ego in charge.

The phrase “above the earth and all temporary nature” is the tell. Kempis isn’t asking you to appreciate nature; he’s asking you to transcend its claims. “Earth” means appetite, status, distraction, the constant churn of wanting. “Temporary nature” signals the medieval Christian hierarchy of value: time-bound goods are not evil, just dangerously persuasive. The subtext is a warning about attachment. You don’t have to renounce everything, but you do have to stop letting everything own you.

Context matters: Kempis writes from a monastic-inflected world (the Devotio Moderna) that prized inwardness over spectacle, daily practice over public piety. The sentence reads like a corrective to performative religion and restless consumer desire before either had modern names. Its elegance is also its provocation: it reframes freedom not as adding options but subtracting dependencies. The “soaring” isn’t escapism; it’s a spiritual vantage point where the temporary can finally be seen as temporary.