Aging & Wisdom Quote by Hannah More

Luxury is cast here not as a reward but as a trap with better lighting. Hannah More stacks the dangers youth already fears - storms, quicksand, chains - then insists the plushest option outbites them all. The line works because it hijacks the grammar of melodrama to make a moral argument: you can see the shipwreck, the sand, the prison bars. Luxury, by contrast, kills quietly, by softening the will.

More was writing in an England where consumer pleasures were swelling with empire, trade, and a rising middle class. Her project, across tracts and conduct literature, was reformist and evangelical: to domesticate desire, to discipline the prosperous, and to make virtue feel urgent in a culture learning to shop. The comparison to "poverty or chains" is pointed. Those hardships may brutalize, but they also clarify. Luxury muddles the inner compass. It persuades young people that comfort is a credential and appetite a right.

The subtext is anxiously political. Youth, to More, is not only a life stage but a social force that can be recruited for godliness and civic order or lost to vanity. Luxury becomes perilous because it trains citizens to expect ease, to confuse refinement with character, and to outsource meaning to things. In a period nervous about revolution abroad and restlessness at home, her warning lands as cultural triage: guard the young from the seductions that make constraint look obsolete.