Top 80 Augustus William Hare Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.”

— Augustus William Hare

2. “The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.”

— Augustus William Hare

3. “Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.”

— Augustus William Hare

Featured in: Self Control Quotes

4. “True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them.”

— Augustus William Hare

5. “If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.”

— Augustus William Hare

6. “Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.”

— Augustus William Hare

7. “Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.”

— Augustus William Hare

8. “Seeking is not always the way to find.”

— Augustus William Hare

9. “Every wise man lives in an observatory.”

— Augustus William Hare

10. “How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.”

— Augustus William Hare

11. “Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology.”

— Augustus William Hare

12. “The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind’s eye and our heart’s eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it.”

— Augustus William Hare

13. “It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.”

— Augustus William Hare

14. “Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children is in fact only self-indulgence under an alias.”

— Augustus William Hare

15. “A lawyer’s brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.”

— Augustus William Hare

16. “How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts when we are surprised to find our prayers answered.”

— Augustus William Hare

17. “Many a man’s vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild.”

— Augustus William Hare

18. “The cross was two pieces of dead wood; and a helpless, unresisting Man was nailed to it; yet it was mightier than the world, and triumphed, and will ever triumph over it.”

— Augustus William Hare

19. “Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.”

— Augustus William Hare

20. “Much of this world’s wisdom is still acquired by necromancy, – by consulting the oracular dead.”

— Augustus William Hare

21. “The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.”

— Augustus William Hare

22. “Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away.”

— Augustus William Hare

23. “I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.”

— Augustus William Hare

24. “A faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none.”

— Augustus William Hare

25. “Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.”

— Augustus William Hare

26. “Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.”

— Augustus William Hare

27. “The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.”

— Augustus William Hare

28. “How few are our real wants! and how easy is it to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable.”

— Augustus William Hare

29. “There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men’s eyes.”

— Augustus William Hare

30. “When will talkers refrain from evil speaking: when listeners refrain from evil-hearing.”

— Augustus William Hare

31. “Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.”

— Augustus William Hare

32. “People cannot go wrong, if you don’t let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them.”

— Augustus William Hare

33. “We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.”

— Augustus William Hare

34. “In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot.”

— Augustus William Hare

35. “Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.”

— Augustus William Hare

36. “The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.”

— Augustus William Hare

37. “Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources, – one pure, the other impure.”

— Augustus William Hare

38. “Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them.”

— Augustus William Hare

39. “The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul’s best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.”

— Augustus William Hare

40. “The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?”

— Augustus William Hare

41. “Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?”

— Augustus William Hare

42. “If Painting be Poetry’s sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.”

— Augustus William Hare

43. “When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator. When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart.”

— Augustus William Hare

44. “Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.”

— Augustus William Hare

45. “Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning.”

— Augustus William Hare

46. “Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.”

— Augustus William Hare

47. “Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.”

— Augustus William Hare

48. “The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be.”

— Augustus William Hare

49. “In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression.”

— Augustus William Hare

50. “What a type of happy family is the family of the Sun! With what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent’s in at once upon him and on one another!”

— Augustus William Hare