Life & Wisdom Quote by George Herbert

A poet-priest in an age of civil fracture doesn’t praise “good words” as decoration; George Herbert treats them as moral technology. “Good words are worth much, and cost little” has the clean snap of a proverb, but its real force is in the implied rebuke. If the price is so low, why are we so stingy with them?

Herbert wrote in early 17th-century England, where language was never just language. Sermons were politics, oaths could be tests of loyalty, and public speech carried spiritual and social consequence. In that context, “good words” are not clever lines or courtly flattery; they’re speech acts with ethical weight: comfort offered, praise given where it’s due, truth spoken without cruelty, restraint practiced when gossip would be easier. The subtext is an economy lesson applied to the soul: the smallest verbal investments can yield disproportionate returns in trust, reconciliation, and communal stability.

The phrasing matters. “Worth much” is deliberately vague, letting the reader supply their own ledger: a friendship saved, a conflict cooled, a conscience steadied. “Cost little” is just as strategic, puncturing our favorite excuse for verbal neglect: scarcity. Herbert is arguing against the false austerity of withholding kindness or clarity as if they were finite resources.

It’s also a quiet warning about the opposite market: bad words are cheap, too, but their hidden fees compound fast. In Herbert’s world, as in ours, speech is the most everyday form of power. He’s urging us to spend it like we mean to live.