Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Bridges

Hope here isn’t a Hallmark glow; it’s an operating system. Bridges compresses an entire moral psychology into one spare admission: “I live on hope.” The phrasing is bodily, almost nutritional. Hope isn’t a belief you hold, it’s what keeps you upright. Then comes the sly pivot: “and that I think do all / Who come into this world.” What begins as private confession widens into a quiet general law, but notice the softening clause “I think.” Bridges isn’t preaching; he’s registering a suspicion about human machinery. That modesty is the subtext’s power move. By refusing certainty, he makes the claim feel truer.

The line sits in that late-Victorian to early-modern hinge moment when old religious assurances were fraying under science, industrial change, and a newly explicit sense of social precarity. Bridges, a physician turned Poet Laureate, writes with someone’s bedside familiarity with fragility. “Who come into this world” subtly shifts hope from aspiration to entry fee: to be born is to be launched into need, and hope is the instinctive prosthetic we use to face uncertainty.

Formally, the slight grammatical roughness (“that I think do all”) matters. It sounds like spoken thought, not marble inscription. That conversational cadence undercuts grandiosity and makes the universal claim feel earned. The intent isn’t to inspire; it’s to level us. Everyone, saint or cynic, survives by projecting a future worth reaching. The bleakness is implied, but so is the stubborn dignity: hope as the minimal, shared fuel of being alive.