Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Hare’s line opens with a neat Victorian sleight of hand: it treats “head” and “heart” not as noble opposites but as badly stored luggage. “Some people carry their hearts in their heads” flatters the rationalist type, but only briefly; the sharper jab lands in the second clause, where “very many carry their heads in their hearts.” That inversion is a polite way of diagnosing a common failure: people don’t just feel, they recruit reason to serve feeling. The head becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy, repeating whatever the heart wants to hear.

What makes the sentence work is its comic bookkeeping. The mind and the emotions are described like items misplaced in the wrong compartment, producing predictable malfunction. “The difficulty is to keep them apart” sounds anti-romantic, even a little puritanical, until Hare adds the corrective: “yet both actively working together.” He’s not arguing for cold logic or unfiltered sentiment; he’s arguing for boundaries. Separation isn’t divorce, it’s differentiation - the ability to know when you’re thinking versus when you’re just justifying.

The context matters. Hare writes from a 19th-century moral-intellectual culture that prized self-command and distrusted melodrama, but he isn’t preaching repression. He’s describing a sophisticated ideal of character: emotional honesty without emotional governance, intellect with traction but not tyranny. The subtext is quietly modern: most “reasoned” positions are emotional positions with better grammar, and maturity is learning to let each faculty do its job without impersonating the other.