Life & Wisdom Quote by William Gurnall

“Humble souls are fearful of their own strength” lands with the bracing clarity of a Puritan pastor who’s spent years watching people underestimate what they’re capable of - and then suffer for it. Gurnall isn’t praising timidity; he’s diagnosing a spiritual and psychological reflex. The line flips the usual moral shorthand: humility doesn’t automatically produce courage. In fact, it can produce a kind of self-suspicion, a fear that any awareness of power is already the first step toward pride.

That’s the subtext doing the work. “Humble souls” here are not weak; they’re conscientious. They’ve been trained to monitor the ego, to treat self-confidence as a slippery slope. So “their own strength” becomes morally dangerous territory. The fear isn’t just of failure, but of success: if you discover your capacity, will you start trusting yourself instead of God? Will strength invite vanity, domination, spiritual complacency?

The context matters. Gurnall wrote in a 17th-century English Protestant world saturated with introspection, where the heart was a battleground and assurance of righteousness was hard-won. In that setting, self-knowledge is double-edged: necessary for holiness, hazardous for pride. The line functions as a warning and a comfort. Warning, because humility can become an excuse to bury talents or avoid responsibility. Comfort, because feeling uneasy about your own power may be evidence of a guarded conscience, not a lack of calling.

It’s a sentence that quietly insists: strength is real, and the humble are often the last to trust it.