Wit & Attitude Quote by William Hazlitt

Travel gets sold as moral disinfectant: buy a ticket, become enlightened. Hazlitt won’t let that fantasy pass. His line lands like a reprimand to the Regency-era cult of the Grand Tour, when young gentlemen treated Europe as a finishing school and came home with a few paintings, some borrowed manners, and the confidence of people who mistook movement for growth. Hazlitt, a critic by trade, is suspicious of that easy prestige. He’s also precise about what travel actually does: it amplifies what’s already in you.

The construction is classic Hazlitt - brisk, unsentimental, and a little cruel. “Not fit” reads like a social corrective, not a personal preference. Then comes the neat antithesis: “a wise man better, and a fool worse.” It’s a rhetorical trapdoor. You can’t nod along without quietly auditioning for the “wise” category, which is exactly Hazlitt’s point: the desire to be improved can itself be vanity.

The subtext is less about passports than about perception. For Hazlitt, experience doesn’t automatically educate; it only provides more material for interpretation. A wise traveler meets difference and revises the self. A fool meets difference and turns it into proof of their own superiority, or into souvenirs of a life they didn’t really live. Travel, in this view, isn’t broadening by nature. It’s a stress test for judgment, curiosity, humility - and for the stories we tell ourselves when no one from home is watching.