Life & Wisdom Quote by George Herbert

Herbert takes aim at a strangely admired weakness: the habit of shrinking yourself on purpose and calling it virtue. "Poor spirit" is a jab, not a diagnosis; it frames excessive self-effacement as a kind of inner poverty, a lack of moral and emotional resources. The line’s bite comes from how it flips the expected script in a Christian culture that praised humility. Herbert isn’t defending swagger. He’s warning that there’s a counterfeit humility that’s really anxiety, vanity, or social fear in devotional clothing.

"Undervalue himself" isn’t just modesty; it’s self-mispricing, a refusal to acknowledge one’s actual gifts and responsibilities. That matters in Herbert’s world: as a priest-poet writing in a tense post-Reformation England, he’s preoccupied with sincerity, with the ways piety can become performance. The addition of "and blush" sharpens the picture. Blushing is involuntary, bodily, public. It signals a person who is hyperaware of being seen, who treats recognition as danger. Herbert suggests that living in constant embarrassment isn’t holiness; it’s a fragile ego, looking for safety in diminishment.

The intent, then, is corrective. Herbert argues for a steadier spiritual posture: accept your worth as given (ultimately by God), neither inflated nor denied. The subtext is almost modern: self-deprecation can be a subtle form of self-obsession, and shame can masquerade as modesty. His line is brisk because the moral is blunt: a spirit that can’t stand upright will call its own collapse humility.