Life & Wisdom Quote by William Shenstone

Hope gets personified here not as a haloed virtue but as a social climber with impeccable manners. Shenstone calls her a flatterer and a parasite, then slyly grants her a backhanded compliment: she is "the most upright" of the lot. That twist is the engine of the line. It invites you to distrust hope while admitting its peculiar decency: unlike greed, vanity, or ambition, hope feeds off us without necessarily making us worse. It lives on our need, yes, but it can also keep us standing.

The class geography is doing quiet work. Hope "frequents" both the poor man's hut and the palace, moving across the 18th-century hierarchy like a courtier who belongs everywhere and answers to no one. In Shenstone's England, where social rank was sticky and poverty wasn t a lifestyle choice but a trap, this is both comfort and critique. Comfort, because the poor are not deprived of the inner resource that lets people imagine tomorrow. Critique, because hope can be a substitute for justice: it visits the hut, but it does not renovate it. The palace has hope too, but there it often masquerades as entitlement - the flattering whisper that power will persist.

Calling hope a parasite is less nihilism than moral realism. Shenstone is warning that hope attaches itself to human vulnerability, feeding on uncertainty, promising more than it can guarantee. Yet he also admits why we tolerate it: it s the one leech that sometimes leaves you alive.