Life & Wisdom Quote by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Hope gets demoted here from virtue to liability. Swinburne’s line reads like a piece of stoic street advice, but it carries a poet’s suspicion of emotional leverage: if you hope “much,” you hand the future a handle to yank you around. The phrasing is deliberately archaic - “thou,” “not much” - as if he’s borrowing the moral authority of scripture only to deliver a cooler, almost secular commandment. It’s austerity disguised as wisdom.

The trick is the asymmetry. He doesn’t say “hope not at all.” He leaves a ration for hope, a small allowance that keeps you from sliding into nihilism. Fear, though, gets zero tolerance. That imbalance hints at Swinburne’s broader posture: exhilarated by intensity, contemptuous of the emotions that shrink the self. Fear is the feeling that makes you bargain with your own freedom; hope, in excess, makes you bargain with your present. Both can be forms of submission, but fear is the more immediate chain.

Context matters: a Victorian world steeped in moral certainty, religious expectation, and the social discipline of “good character.” Swinburne, famously allergic to conventional piety and propriety, offers a counter-ethic that sounds calm but isn’t meek. It’s the voice of someone who’s seen grand ideals curdle into coercion - political, romantic, spiritual. Keep your expectations low, your nerves lower: not because life is empty, but because your autonomy is worth more than your fantasies.