Life & Wisdom Quote by George Herbert

Herbert’s line is a trapdoor under two fashionable certainties. In a century where England’s religious settlement was still raw, “atheism” and “superstition” weren’t neutral descriptors; they were charged insults flung across a culture trying to police belief. Herbert, an Anglican priest-poet with a skeptic’s eye for spiritual vanity, stages them as twin failures that conveniently serve the same employer.

The intent isn’t to demonize doubt so much as to expose a devilish strategy: polarize the field until the reasonable middle collapses. “Divides” is the operative verb. Evil doesn’t need to invent new vices; it just has to sort people into camps that can’t hear each other. Atheism here signals the proud refusal of transcendence, the posture that nothing is owed beyond the self. Superstition marks the opposite error: an anxious religiosity that turns faith into talismans, rituals into leverage, God into a vending machine of omens. Herbert’s subtext is that both positions counterfeit seriousness. One dismisses mystery with swagger; the other exploits it with fear.

What makes the aphorism work is its unsettling symmetry. It denies readers the comfortable identity of being “not like those people.” If you congratulate yourself on being rational, Herbert hints you may be drifting toward a different kind of credulity: faith in your own immunity to error. If you congratulate yourself on being devout, he warns that devotion can curdle into magical thinking. The line lands because it treats extremity as a spiritual convenience, and moderation not as blandness but as vigilance.