Daily Inspiration Quote by George Fox

Fox is prescribing a kind of inner disarmament: not silence as passivity, but stillness as discipline. “Be still” lands like a command against the noise of the self - the reactive ego that turns every insult into a crisis and every fear into a plan. Then comes the sharper pivot: “and cool.” Coolness here isn’t fashionable detachment; it’s spiritual temperature control. Fox is warning that heat - anger, panic, the adrenaline of righteousness - can masquerade as conviction. If you want to hear the truth, you have to lower the volume and the fever.

The phrasing “thine own mind and spirit” is doing quiet work. Fox isn’t mainly policing behavior; he’s targeting the interior machinery that produces it. That fits his Quaker context: the early Friends rejected ornate clerical authority in favor of direct, inward encounter with the “Inner Light.” Stillness wasn’t a retreat from the world; it was the technology that made discernment possible, the condition for distinguishing divine leading from personal impulse.

There’s also a political subtext. Fox preached in a century of English upheaval, when religious certainty often traveled with mobs, prisons, and state violence. “Still and cool” reads as a survival tactic for dissenters and a rebuke to zealotry on all sides. The line implies that spiritual credibility isn’t proved by volume or fury, but by steadiness - the kind that can hold under pressure without hardening into cruelty.