Life & Wisdom Quote by Aaron Hill

“Customs form us all” lands like a polite correction to the flattering story people tell about themselves: that they arrived at their convictions by sheer reason. Hill, a poet writing in early 18th-century Britain, is speaking from a world where “nature” and “rank” were constantly invoked to justify social order, yet the ground was shifting underfoot. Commerce, print culture, and expanding empire were bringing unfamiliar languages, manners, and faiths into view. In that churn, customs start to look less like destiny and more like a quiet technology of control.

The line’s power comes from its steady escalation. Hill begins with the broadest claim (customs “form us all”), then narrows the scope to what we treat as innermost property: “our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs.” It’s a deliberate invasion of the private self. By the time he lands on “consequences of our place of birth,” the punch isn’t simply that environment matters; it’s that certainty itself is provincial. The “most fixed beliefs” aren’t proof of truth, just proof of deep training.

Subtext: humility, but not the soft kind. Hill implies that moral superiority is often an accident of geography, and that outrage at other peoples’ practices can be a failure of imagination. In an era of religious conflict and colonial encounter, the observation reads as both a warning and an invitation: if customs manufacture conviction, then reform requires more than argument. It requires changing the stage on which people learn what feels “obvious.”