Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas treats temperance less like a lifestyle tweak and more like internal governance: a habit of mind that fastens desire to something sturdier than appetite. The phrasing is revealing. “Simply” is doing strategic work, stripping away the medieval suspicion that virtue must look dramatic or punitive. Temperance isn’t the theatrical refusal of pleasure; it’s a trained disposition, a stable orientation that makes restraint feel less like emergency braking and more like normal steering.

“Binds the passion” can sound repressive to modern ears, but Aquinas is not arguing for emotional amputation. In his moral psychology, passions aren’t evil; they’re powerful energies that need form. Binding is a metaphor of tethering, not silencing: desire kept in relation to reason, to the good, to the demands of community. Temperance, then, is freedom by constraint - the paradox at the heart of much classical virtue ethics. Untethered passion doesn’t liberate; it drags.

The context is scholastic theology in a Christian Aristotelian frame: virtue as habit, cultivated through practice, aimed at human flourishing under God. Aquinas is also writing against two distortions: moral laxity (letting the passions rule) and moralism-as-hatred-of-the-body (treating pleasure as suspect in itself). His intent is to make room for embodied life while refusing to let embodiment become destiny.

The subtext lands sharply now: our culture often confuses intensity with authenticity. Aquinas offers a colder, more bracing claim - that the self is most itself when it can hold its own desires without being held hostage by them.