Meaning & Analysis
I refuse to take into my heart (treat as important) something that ought to be beneath my notice—what you yourself treat with contempt or tread underfoot.
Insights
Rightly Ordered Values
Counsels keeping trivial or contemptible matters in their proper, low place; do not elevate what is base to the rank of deep concern.
Emotional Boundaries
Advises guarding the heart from others’ slights or follies; do not internalize what deserves only a shrug.
Self-Respect
Refuses to dignify another’s careless behavior with costly attention; one’s esteem is not to be hostage to those who themselves treat the matter lightly.
Priority Discipline
Warns against misallocation of care—spending scarce feeling on low-stakes issues and neglecting what is worthy of inward commitment.
Anatomy as Moral Map
Heart and heel form a vertical hierarchy: what belongs underfoot must not be enthroned within. The body’s topography becomes a guide for valuation.
Comparative Standard
Several attestations frame it relationally—‘that thou settest at thy heel’—arguing it’s folly to prize more than the originator prizes, a check against asymmetric investment in quarrels or affections.
Lear’s Parable
Shakespeare’s echo (‘The man that makes his toe / What he his heart should make…’) dramatizes the same inversion of values: elevating foot-things corrupts the inner order and brings pain.
Stoic Coloring
The maxim carries Stoic restraint: govern impressions; let externals remain external. By refusing to ‘set at heart,’ one keeps agency over emotion.
Domestic and Social Use
Appears in contexts of marital spats and petty slights; it functions as folk therapy—lower the stakes, don’t make another’s churlishness your burden.
Rhetorical Devices
Antithesis
Opposes ‘heart’ to ‘heel’ to sharpen the contrast between high care and low contempt.
Synecdoche
‘Heart’ stands for inward affection and priority; ‘heel’ for what is trodden down and disregarded.
Chiasmus/Reversal (in variants)
Some versions flip heart/heel between speakers, creating a neat rhetorical mirror about mismatched valuations.
Aphoristic Compression
Compact, proverbial cadence turns an ordering principle into a portable rule for feeling.
Metaphorical Topography
Uses the body’s vertical layout to spatialize worth, making the counsel memorable and picturable.
Transcription
Quotations
Nor wyll [I] .. suche foly feele, To set at my herte, that thou settest at thy heele.
Shall I set at my harte that thou setst at thy heele?
Never set at thy heart, thy wives churlish part, That she sets at her heel.
Finding it folly to sett that at his heart which others set at their heele.
I will not set that at my heels that my frend sets at his heart.
Take not that to your heart, which they set at their heeles.
Shakespeare Citations
The man that makes his toe What he his heart should make Shall of a corn cry woe.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.