Faith & Spirit Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line looks like a motivational poster, but it’s doing something sharper: it turns victory into a psychological artifact, not a moral reward. “If you think you can win, you can win” is less a guarantee than a provocation. Hazlitt, a critic by trade and a skeptic by temperament, is teasing the thin membrane between confidence and reality. The sentence is built like a dare. It doesn’t promise fairness, only leverage. Belief is cast as a force multiplier, the one resource that can be manufactured internally when external conditions are hostile.

The key move is the second sentence. “Faith is necessary to victory” shifts from conditional (“if”) to categorical (“is”), making faith sound like logistics rather than inspiration. Hazlitt isn’t romanticizing spiritual conviction; he’s talking about the discipline of self-persuasion. In his era, Britain is grappling with revolution’s aftershocks, the rise of mass politics, and the new prestige of “character” as social capital. In that context, faith reads like a civic technology: the ability to act decisively under uncertainty, to keep one’s nerve when the world won’t offer guarantees.

The subtext is almost cynical: talent and justice don’t matter if you can’t generate belief strong enough to carry you through risk, humiliation, and repeated failure. Hazlitt’s critic’s eye is on performance, not purity. Victory belongs to the person who can inhabit a future result before it exists, then behave as though the world is already catching up.