Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Vanity loves a megaphone, and Hare is needling the kind of writer who mistakes volume for value. “Many are ambitious of saying grand things” sounds, at first, like an innocent hunger for significance. Then he snaps the trap shut with his clarifier: “that is, of being grandiloquent.” Not grand in thought, grand in diction. The line is less a moral reprimand than a diagnosis of literary ego: the ambition isn’t to illuminate, but to be seen illuminating.

The craftsmanship is in the pivot. Hare pretends to offer a neutral definition, but it’s a correction disguised as translation. By equating “saying grand things” with “being grandiloquent,” he exposes how easily rhetoric becomes performance, a costume that signals depth without doing the work of it. “Grandiloquent” itself is doing the heavy lifting: a Latinate, slightly fussy word that mimics the very vice it condemns, letting Hare land his critique with a dry, almost self-aware precision.

Context matters. Hare wrote in a Victorian world that prized eloquence, moral seriousness, and public display of cultivation. It was also a period of bloated prose, pious self-mythologizing, and the social rewards of sounding “elevated.” Hare’s jab targets a culture where style could substitute for substance, where being impressive was treated as evidence of being important.

Read now, it feels uncannily current: the temptation to write for the quote-card, the viral sentence, the “mic drop.” Hare’s warning is simple and unforgiving: if your goal is to sound profound, you’ll end up merely loud.