Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Aurelius Hare skewers a Victorian paradox with the dry precision of someone who’s watched polite society tie itself in knots for decades. “Examples,” he admits, would be “excellent things” - a pointed nod to the era’s obsession with moral instruction, self-improvement manuals, and the idea that character could be coached by observing the right people. Then he pulls the rug out: the very human traits that make examples necessary also make them unusable.

The line turns on a neat double-bind. “So modest that none will set” isn’t praise; it’s a critique of performative humility, the social code that forbids earnest self-assertion. In Hare’s world, even doing the right thing publicly risks looking self-satisfied, so the would-be exemplar retreats into manners and understatement. But the second half bites harder: “so vain that none will follow them.” This is vanity not as glamour but as stubborn ego - the refusal to be seen learning from someone else, the childish insistence that taking guidance is a form of submission.

The subtext is an argument about social learning: cultures don’t change because good models exist; they change when people can tolerate both roles - the vulnerability of modeling and the humility of imitation. Hare, writing in a Britain anxious about class, respectability, and “proper” conduct, diagnoses a society that prizes virtue as an ornament yet sabotages the mechanisms that would spread it. The wit lands because it’s symmetrical and damning: we protect our image coming and going, and call the result “principle.”