Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt doesn’t romanticize friendship; he audits it. The line reads like a brusque piece of moral housekeeping: when the living thing is gone, stop polishing the shell. Calling a hollowed-out relationship a "mockery" makes the social performance feel not merely sad but indecent, as if you’re forcing a corpse to sit upright at dinner. Hazlitt’s genius here is the quick slide from etiquette to anatomy. Friendship isn’t a vow you honor regardless of conditions; it’s a substance with a shelf life, and once it turns, sentimentality becomes a kind of fraud.

The subtext is a critique of politeness as cowardice. "Part, while you can part friends" suggests a narrow window when separation can still be dignified, mutual, even affectionate. Wait too long and the break won’t be a clean cut; it will be a slow rot of resentments, obligations, and performative niceness. The embalming image skewers the impulse to preserve relationships for their display value: shared history, social convenience, the comfort of being seen as loyal. Hazlitt implies that what we often call loyalty is just fear of the social cost of honesty.

Context matters: as a Romantic-era critic, Hazlitt lived amid shifting allegiances - political, literary, personal - and wrote with a cultivated impatience for cant. His sentence is both counsel and provocation, daring readers to prefer clean endings over decorative decay. It’s not anti-friendship; it’s pro-integrity, insisting that affection deserves reality, not ritual.