"Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook"
About this Quote
Hope, in Goldsmith's hands, isn't a candle in the dark; it's a lure in the water. "Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook" flips a treasured virtue into a mechanism of capture, and the sting is in how casually it does so. The line works because it trades the language of uplift for the cold grammar of fishing: bait is designed to be swallowed, and the hook is designed to hurt. Hope doesn't just accompany risk here; it disguises it.
Goldsmith was writing in an 18th-century Britain addicted to schemes and surfaces: expanding markets, speculative bubbles still fresh in cultural memory, and a rapidly professionalizing public sphere where persuasion became an industry. In that world, hope is less an inner resource than a social technology. It makes bad deals sound temporary, makes distant rewards feel imminent, makes exploitation look like opportunity. The "any" is the nasty punch: not some hooks, not most, any. Hope is the universal solvent for skepticism.
The subtext is psychological and moral at once. People aren't simply fooled by others; they collaborate in their own seduction because hope lets them postpone unpleasant arithmetic. Goldsmith's couplet-sized cynicism lands because it refuses the comforting story that deception only succeeds through cleverness. Often it succeeds because the victim supplies the missing ingredient: desire. Hope, as he frames it, isn't innocence. It's appetite with a blindfold.
Goldsmith was writing in an 18th-century Britain addicted to schemes and surfaces: expanding markets, speculative bubbles still fresh in cultural memory, and a rapidly professionalizing public sphere where persuasion became an industry. In that world, hope is less an inner resource than a social technology. It makes bad deals sound temporary, makes distant rewards feel imminent, makes exploitation look like opportunity. The "any" is the nasty punch: not some hooks, not most, any. Hope is the universal solvent for skepticism.
The subtext is psychological and moral at once. People aren't simply fooled by others; they collaborate in their own seduction because hope lets them postpone unpleasant arithmetic. Goldsmith's couplet-sized cynicism lands because it refuses the comforting story that deception only succeeds through cleverness. Often it succeeds because the victim supplies the missing ingredient: desire. Hope, as he frames it, isn't innocence. It's appetite with a blindfold.
Quote Details
| Topic | Hope |
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