Daily Inspiration Quote by Johann Arndt

Arndt’s genius here is the bait-and-switch: he pretends to warn against curiosity about “worldly pleasures,” then indicts something more embarrassing than curiosity - passivity. The line “so far from laboring to know” sounds like a pious compliment (at least he isn’t chasing temptation), but Arndt flips it into a charge of moral laziness. The problem isn’t sophisticated hedonism; it’s the slumped posture of a person who “gives himself up” to life on autopilot.

The forbidden tree becomes a psychological diagnosis. In Genesis, the tree is an external object, a clear boundary. Arndt relocates it inside the body: “this lust is really the forbidden tree.” That move matters in a late-Reformation world where doctrinal battles could distract from inward reform. As a Lutheran pietist precursor, Arndt is allergic to religion as mere argument or affiliation; he wants attention, vigilance, a re-educated desire. Sin isn’t a single dramatic transgression; it’s drift.

Subtext: the so-called “careless and thoughtless state” is itself a choice, one that disguises surrender as innocence. Arndt presses on the self-deception: you don’t need to “know” pleasures in a refined way to be mastered by them. You can be spiritually dull and still enslaved. The sting is that he denies the reader the flattering narrative of temptation as exotic. The forbidden tree isn’t out there, shimmering. It’s the ordinary, unexamined appetite that quietly reorganizes a life around itself.