Leadership Quote by Isaac Watts

Self-abasement is doing real political work here. "Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still" compresses a whole hierarchy of creation into nine blunt words, and then flips it: the speaker isn’t merely low, he’s lower than what people instinctively treat as lowest. Flies and worms are the traditional shorthand for the disposable; flowers for the fragile and ornamental. Pairing the repulsive with the lovely is the trick. Watts makes humility feel total, not performative, because even the beautiful is held up as a rebuke.

The line’s force comes from its grammar. "Exceed" is an accounting verb, a ledger word: worth measured, tallied, found wanting. That phrasing smuggles in a moral economy familiar to early modern Protestant culture, where self-scrutiny was a virtue and pride a political danger. In a public life shaped by sermon culture and the rhetoric of moral reform, calling yourself worse than vermin isn’t just piety; it’s credibility. You can’t accuse others of corruption if you’re not seen as capable of accusing yourself.

The subtext is strategic self-positioning: I have no claim to grandeur, so you can trust my claims about the world. It also hints at the era’s intense anxiety about human significance. When even a flower "exceeds" you, power and status start to look like paper crowns. The line doesn’t ask for sympathy as much as it clears space for grace, or for reform, by stripping the speaker of entitlement.