Life & Wisdom Quote by Washington Irving

Irving goes for the jugular of respectable society: it is not hunger that breaks you first, but the exhausting theater of not looking hungry. Poverty can be endured as a material condition; pretense is poverty plus surveillance, plus self-surveillance. “Harasses” is the key verb here - not “hurts” or “shames,” but needles, nags, keeps you awake. The ruined man is stalked by appearances.

The sentence works because it stages a psychological duel. “A proud mind and an empty purse” is clean, almost aphoristic, but the real cruelty is in the phrase that follows: “keeping up of a hollow show.” Irving treats status not as a possession but as a performance with overhead costs. Once money falters, dignity becomes a subscription you can’t cancel without social consequences. The “show” is “hollow” because everyone involved understands the script; it’s a shared fiction maintained out of fear, habit, and the hope of reprieve.

Context matters: Irving is writing in an early American culture still importing Old World hierarchies while pretending it has outgrown them. Credit, reputation, and gentility are forms of currency; losing them means losing access, not just comfort. The “must soon come to an end” lands like a deadline and a threat - the inevitable moment when private collapse becomes public knowledge. Irving’s subtext is bluntly modern: the sharpest pain of economic decline is often reputational, because society teaches you to measure your worth in what you can convincingly display.