Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Pride, Fuller suggests, is a cannibal: it doesn not just offend humility or virtue; it eventually turns on itself. The line has the punch of a proverb and the menace of a curse. By personifying pride twice, Fuller stages an ugly little drama in six words: pride as actor and pride as victim. That mirroring is the point. What looks like self-respect curdles into rivalry, status anxiety, and contempt, until the very energy that props up the ego becomes the force that humiliates it. The insult is physical and public - "spit in ... face" evokes a street-level desecration, not a private moral failing. Pride does not merely fall; it gets shamed.

As a 17th-century English clergyman, Fuller writes in a culture obsessed with rank, honor, and religious discipline - a society where reputation was social currency and where spiritual language policed civic life. In that setting, pride is not an abstract sin but a practical accelerant for conflict: between neighbors, factions, even within a church. The Civil War era amplified this, as rival certainties and wounded prestige hardened into violence. Fuller collapses that larger turmoil into a psychological mechanism: pride cannot tolerate another pride in the room, because each one demands the same throne.

The subtext is pastoral but unsentimental: if you build a self on superiority, you are also building the instrument of your own disgrace. Pride promises elevation; Fuller reminds you it also manufactures enemies, and the most reliable one wears your face.