Life & Wisdom Quote by Augustus Hare

Self-portraiture is where morality goes to get its makeup done. Hare’s jab lands because it targets a particular Victorian performance: the cultivated modesty that doubles as a badge of refinement. “What hypocrites we seem” isn’t just confession; it’s a social diagnosis. The first-person plural pulls the reader into complicity, as if hypocrisy isn’t a personal failing so much as a shared etiquette for managing status.

The line hinges on a brutal split-screen: “words” versus “hearts.” Outwardly, we narrate ourselves in the language of humility because humility is persuasive; it disarms criticism and signals breeding. Inwardly, pride keeps its seat of power, not as a flamboyant vice but as the quiet engine of self-regard. Hare understands that self-talk is rarely neutral. When we “talk of ourselves,” we’re not reporting; we’re curating. The humility in the sentence is often strategic, a way to control how others see us while still privately insisting on our own significance.

Context matters: Hare wrote in an era obsessed with propriety, diaries, and moral self-scrutiny, when reputations were fragile and virtue was a public currency. The sentence reads like something overheard in a drawing room and then sharpened into a maxim. Its intent is corrective, but not saintly: it exposes how easily the language of virtue becomes a camouflage for vanity, and how the self can be both speaker and spin doctor.