Life & Wisdom Quote by Cleobulus

“Safeguard the health both of body and soul” lands with the calm authority of someone who thinks excess is the real enemy. Cleobulus, counted among the Seven Sages of archaic Greece, wrote in a culture where wisdom wasn’t a private self-help project; it was civic infrastructure. A polis needed citizens who could fight, deliberate, worship, and raise families. “Safeguard” isn’t a soft verb. It implies threat, vigilance, and stewardship: health is not assumed, it’s defended.

The pairing of body and soul does a lot of quiet work. In a world without modern medicine or psychotherapy, “health” wasn’t a clinical metric but an ethical condition, a kind of balance that kept a person usable to themselves and legible to the community. The line rejects the Greek tendency to let excellence in one domain excuse collapse in another: the athlete who’s reckless, the thinker who’s ascetic to the point of brittleness, the pious citizen who neglects the physical duties of life. It’s an early argument against specialization as identity.

Subtextually, this is also a hedge against hubris. Archaic wisdom literature loves moderation because it recognizes how easily pride masquerades as virtue. Tend the body without vanity; tend the soul without sanctimony. The two are mutually reinforcing, and the word “both” is the moral trapdoor: you don’t get to pick the version that flatters you.

Context matters, too: in a society threaded with ritual, war, and public speech, your “soul” wasn’t merely inner feelings. It was character under pressure. Cleobulus is prescribing resilience as a public good.