Life & Wisdom Quote by Aaron Hill

Courage, Hill insists, turns shabby the moment it moves into a crowd. “Poorly housed” is a pointed phrase: it suggests bravery isn’t just diluted by numbers, it becomes a kind of bad architecture, a flimsy shelter that collapses under scrutiny. The line aims at the comforting fiction that safety in numbers equals virtue. Hill’s courage is not the chant at a rally or the swagger of a backed-up bully; it’s the solitary nerve that doesn’t need witnesses to be real.

The lion image does heavy lifting because it’s both flattering and accusatory. To be brave is to act like a predator with purpose, not a statistician of social approval. The lion “never counts” because counting is already a confession: if you’re tallying allies, you’re negotiating with fear. Hill’s verb choices sharpen the subtext. The lion doesn’t “fight” so much as “scatter,” reducing the opposition to movement, panic, dispersal. True courage doesn’t merely withstand resistance; it reorganizes the scene so resistance can’t cohere.

Context matters. Hill writes in an early-18th-century culture obsessed with reputation, party allegiance, and public performance - a world where honor could look suspiciously like crowd management. This line pushes back against the era’s social arithmetic. It’s also a warning about mob confidence: the kind that feels righteous until it’s alone. Hill isn’t romanticizing recklessness; he’s arguing that courage, to count as courage, can’t depend on counting.