"The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking"
About this Quote
Productivity culture loves to treat distraction as a moral failing. Phaedrus flips that script with a poet's quiet audacity: diversion isn’t the enemy of thought, it’s part of thought’s maintenance plan. The line works because it smuggles a permissive philosophy into the language of obligation. "Ought" keeps the sentence in the realm of discipline, not indulgence; "sometimes" tightens it, refusing to turn leisure into a lifestyle brand. Diversion, in this framing, is not escape but strategy.
The subtext is almost physiological. Minds fatigue, harden into ruts, start confusing repetition for rigor. By insisting on returning "to better thinking", Phaedrus implies that sustained seriousness can actually degrade judgment. The reset matters: stepping away isn’t surrendering attention, it’s restoring it. That’s a startlingly modern insight for a first-century BCE writer, closer to what we now call cognitive recovery than to the guilt-soaked binaries of work versus play.
Context helps: Phaedrus, writing fables under the early Roman Empire, knew something about indirectness. Fables are diversions that tell the truth safely, entertainment that sharpens rather than dulls. His sentence doubles as a defense of art itself: the poem, the story, the detour. The mind comes back not just refreshed, but reordered, with new angles on old problems. Diversion becomes the Trojan horse that delivers clarity.
The subtext is almost physiological. Minds fatigue, harden into ruts, start confusing repetition for rigor. By insisting on returning "to better thinking", Phaedrus implies that sustained seriousness can actually degrade judgment. The reset matters: stepping away isn’t surrendering attention, it’s restoring it. That’s a startlingly modern insight for a first-century BCE writer, closer to what we now call cognitive recovery than to the guilt-soaked binaries of work versus play.
Context helps: Phaedrus, writing fables under the early Roman Empire, knew something about indirectness. Fables are diversions that tell the truth safely, entertainment that sharpens rather than dulls. His sentence doubles as a defense of art itself: the poem, the story, the detour. The mind comes back not just refreshed, but reordered, with new angles on old problems. Diversion becomes the Trojan horse that delivers clarity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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