Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

Self-regard and self-contempt, welded into a single command: that tension is the engine of Edward Young's moral psychology. "Revere thyself, and yet thyself despise" reads like a paradox because it is one, a barbed couplet of instruction designed to keep the ego permanently off-balance. In the early 18th-century devotional mindset Young writes from, the self is not a brand to build but a problem to manage. The line courts the reader with dignity ("revere") and immediately yanks it away ("despise"), staging humility not as softness but as discipline.

The intent is double: insist on the soul's worth while refusing the soul the indulgence of self-importance. Reverence here isn't self-esteem; it's recognition of an inner moral seat, a conscience that carries weight because it answers to God. The "despise" isn't self-hatred for its own sake; it's contempt for vanity, appetite, and the flattering stories the mind tells to avoid judgment. Young aims at a specific target: the polite confidence of his era's emerging individualism, with its taste for reason, reputation, and social polish. He doesn't reject individuality; he weaponizes it against itself.

Why it works is in the compact rhythm of command. The repetition of "thyself" makes the self both subject and object, forcing a split-screen view: you are simultaneously the judge and the defendant. It's a line engineered to produce vigilance, the feeling that moral clarity requires both a high view of human calling and a low view of human performance.