Meaning & Analysis
One recognizes the right or superior course yet still chooses an inferior, harmful, or ignoble one.
Insights
Weakness of will
Reason discerns the good, but appetite or fear overrules it; judgment and action fall out of alignment.
Intention–behavior gap
Good resolutions collapse at the point of execution, revealing how knowledge and liking do not guarantee performance.
Rationalized self-betrayal
After choosing the worse, the mind invents stories to soothe dissonance—turning clarity into compliance with temptation.
Habit’s tyranny
The ‘worst’ often means the familiar; well-worn routines tug harder than fresh convictions, so one walks the old path despite better sight.
Social drift
Peer norms and pressures can pull a person toward lower standards, even when they privately admire the higher way.
Tragic lucidity
Seeing the best intensifies the pathos of failing to follow it—self-knowledge heightens, rather than cures, the fall.
Classical lineage
The proverb echoes Ovid’s Medea—‘I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse’—a line rendered in English by Golding and endlessly imitated; it became a touchstone for articulating conscious moral failure.
Akrasia debate
Socrates doubted one could knowingly do wrong; Aristotle explained akrasia as knowing ‘in a way’ yet being overpowered by appetite. The proverb sides with Aristotle: sight without steadiness is not yet virtue.
Pauline resonance
It rhymes with Romans 7—‘the good that I would I do not’—casting the struggle as inner civil war between law of mind and law of members, a frame influential in early modern moral reflection.
Cognitive mapping
The verbs oppose perceptual ‘seeing’ to kinetic ‘following’: ethics is pictured as a road. Vision names discernment; following names practice. The proverb teaches that moral geography requires both sight and stride.
Psychology of time
Many ‘worst’ choices pay now and cost later. Hyperbolic discounting and present bias explain why the near prize beats the known better: the future’s ‘best’ loses to the instant’s tug.
Confessional function
Spoken aloud, the line is a compact confession—disarming, communal, and corrective. It acknowledges guilt without self-exoneration, inviting discipline rather than mere display of insight.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
Sets ‘best’ against ‘worst’ and ‘see’ against ‘follow,’ sharpening the split between cognition and conduct.
Isocolon
Two short, balanced clauses give aphoristic snap, making the contrast memorable and portable.
Metaphor (vision/path)
Seeing stands for discerning value; following stands for chosen course—an embodied image of moral agency.
Irony
The speaker’s clear-sightedness heightens, rather than prevents, error; awareness and wrongdoing coincide.
Parataxis
The unadorned ‘but’ linkage compresses a complex psychological failure into a stark hinge.
Transcription
Quotations
And he is an vnhippy man or woman, that god hath gieuen bothe wyt and reason, and putteth hym in chose, and woll chose the worst parte.
The best I see and like: the worst I follow headlong still.
For it is a common saying, that he is in great faulte, which knoweth what is good and doeth it not.
Foresee not the best and follow the worst.
We see what's good, and thereto we consent, But yet we choose the worst, and soone repent.
Medea saw... and prais'd the better course... [but] she pursu'd the worse.
Whats bad I follow, Yet I see whats good.
The best I see, the worst I follow still.
In Youth there is a Fate, that swayes vs still, To know what's Good, and yet pursue what's Ill.
It is not enough to know good, but one must do it.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.