Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Hare’s sentence has the stern snap of a Victorian moralist who’s watched people swear off vice on Sunday and relapse by Tuesday. The line isn’t just pious hand-wringing; it’s a compact theory of human momentum. “Gain is slower and harder than loss” frames virtue as something you build like muscle: incremental, fragile, easily undone. Then he flips the mirror: “in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.” The syntax does the work of the argument, rushing through how swiftly we acquire the harmful, then dragging its feet on the difficulty of shedding it.

The intent is corrective, almost pastoral. Hare wants the reader to stop treating moral backsliding as a surprise and start treating it as the default physics of character. The subtext is less “humans are monsters” than “humans are leaky.” Goodness requires maintenance; neglect doesn’t just pause progress, it reverses it. That asymmetry still reads modern because it maps cleanly onto habit science and platform-era incentives: it’s easier to fall into doomscrolling than to rebuild attention; easier to pick up cynicism than to recover trust; easier to accumulate clutter, debt, resentment, than to unwind them.

Context matters: Hare wrote in a 19th-century culture obsessed with self-improvement, restraint, and moral accounting. His “proof” language borrows the confidence of sermon and treatise, but the observation is practical, not mystical. He’s offering a bleak comfort: if goodness feels like work, that doesn’t mean you’re failing; it means you’re human.