Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Southey

Southey takes a proverb everyone knows and quietly commits the bolder heresy: he refuses to let cynicism have the last word. “Hell is paved with good intentions” is the kind of line that flatters the worldly listener; it turns moral aspiration into a punchline and lets the speaker feel shrewd for distrusting virtue. Southey’s pivot, “they have their place in heaven also,” keeps the wit but changes the moral accounting. Intentions aren’t acquitted of consequence, yet they’re not dismissed as meaningless, either. The sentence performs a balancing act: it grants the proverb’s sting (“more wittily than charitably said”) while calling out what that sting hides, a delight in condemning people for failing to be perfect.

The subtext is almost pastoral. Southey implies a moral ecology in which motives matter even when outcomes fall short. That’s not a loophole for incompetence; it’s an argument against the era’s fashionable hardness. Coming out of the Romantic period’s obsession with sincerity and inner life, the line reads like a defense of interior moral effort against a culture eager to weaponize irony. He’s also, slyly, policing the social function of wit: cleverness can be a form of cruelty, especially when it treats human striving as an object of ridicule.

Contextually, Southey sits in a Britain of reform arguments, religious seriousness, and political backlash. In that climate, the quote works as a rebuke to both sanctimony and sneering: intentions alone don’t save you, but a society that treats intentions as nothing trains itself to be merciless.