Nature & Animals Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s imperative rush feels like a man shaking you by the lapels and insisting you rejoin the living. “Look up, laugh loud, talk big” isn’t just boosterism; it’s a deliberate counter-program to the period’s cultivated pallor and moral self-surveillance. As a Romantic-era critic, Hazlitt watched a culture that could turn refinement into self-denial: politeness as shrinking, piety as dullness, “sensibility” as a kind of sanctioned languor. His answer is bodily, almost defiant. He stacks verbs the way a preacher stacks sins, except these are pleasures: posture, volume, appetite, display.

The phrase “keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye” is doing double duty. On its face, it’s a portrait of health. Underneath, it’s an argument about vitality as a moral stance. Hazlitt is suspicious of the pose of suffering, the fashionable misery that flatters itself as depth. Color and fire mean you’re not performing your own fragility.

Then he turns surprisingly material: “adorn your person.” That line undercuts any puritan reading. He’s not advocating inner virtue over outer life; he’s insisting the outer life matters. Even “animal spirits,” that old term for the body’s animating force, is a pointed rebuke to an age eager to discipline desire into silence. Hazlitt’s intent is not mere hedonism but resistance: stay luminous, stay loud, stay complicated enough to offend the dour custodians of taste.