Life & Wisdom Quote by George Herbert

Commerce, Herbert suggests, is a game built on asymmetry: the buyer must see everything, the seller can afford to see nothing. The line lands because it’s not really about eyesight. It’s about moral hazard. Sellers can profit from ignorance - sometimes by design, sometimes simply by letting optimism do the work - while buyers carry the burden of verification. “A hundred eyes” is a comic exaggeration with a hard edge: diligence isn’t a virtue here, it’s self-defense.

Herbert’s context matters. Writing in early 17th-century England, he’s a devotional poet living amid expanding markets, rising consumer goods, and a culture that still treated trade with suspicion. The proverb-like snap fits his era’s appetite for moral epigrams: tiny sentences that pretend to be common sense while smuggling in an ethical warning. His subtext is Protestant and pragmatic at once: the world is fallen, incentives are crooked, so don’t confuse a confident pitch with truth.

What makes the line durable is how neatly it anticipates modern buyer-beware economics. “Seller not one” doesn’t mean sellers are literally blind; it implies they don’t need to look because the system often doesn’t require them to. In that sense, Herbert isn’t just scolding individual dishonesty. He’s pointing at a structure where risk is unevenly distributed - and reminding you that trust, in a marketplace, is rarely free.