Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Underhill

Austere on the surface, almost severe, Underhill's line smuggles a whole spiritual program into a sentence that sounds like common sense. "The will is what matters" is a kind of moral narrowing: strip away mood, circumstance, even talent, and you're left with the one faculty you can aim. Underhill isn't praising stubbornness for its own sake; she's naming will as the hinge between inner life and action, the engine that keeps devotion from dissolving into sentiment.

The kicker is "as long as you have that, you are safe". Safe from what? Not from pain, or failure, or the ordinary chaos of the world. Safe from drift. Underhill wrote in an era that watched confidence collapse into mechanized slaughter and cultural disillusionment; her broader work treats spirituality less as rapture than as discipline amid noise. In that context, "safe" means anchored: a person who can choose, commit, and return is not at the mercy of every passing fear or appetite.

There's also a quietly radical democratization here. Will, unlike pedigree or education, is theoretically available to anyone. It's a way of relocating authority from institutions to the interior, without slipping into self-indulgent individualism. Underhill's subtext is that the spiritual life is not a special-effects experience; it's repeated consent. The sentence works because it offers comfort without coddling: your feelings may be unreliable, your world unstable, but your capacity to orient yourself remains a last refuge and a first responsibility.