Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell’s line is devotional on its face, but it’s also a power move: a tight metaphysical claim that quietly rearranges who gets to define value. “God is His own Design and End” rejects the idea that divinity exists to serve anything outside itself - no human need, no political order, no ecclesiastical convenience. In an era when “design” and “end” were the key terms of natural theology and social hierarchy, she’s using the language of purpose to insist on radical self-sufficiency at the top of the chain of being.

The second clause sharpens the blade: “no other Worthy of Him.” Worthiness is usually a social currency, traded by institutions that grant honors and demand obedience. Astell flips it upward. If only God is worthy of God, then all human claims to ultimate authority become provisional, derivative, suspect. That matters coming from a woman writing in late Stuart England, when she was constantly negotiating the pressure to justify women’s intellect and spiritual agency within patriarchal religious structures. Her feminism is not always loud in the sentence itself, but the logic is familiar: if God owes nothing to the world, then the world owes less than it thinks to kings, husbands, and custom.

It also functions as an antidote to instrumental religion: the piety that treats God as a lever for prosperity, respectability, or national greatness. Astell’s God can’t be recruited. The austerity is the point. She’s building a moral architecture where the highest good is not usefulness but rightful orientation, and where worship is less transaction than alignment.