Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line lands like a civility lesson delivered with a switchblade: love, he implies, isn’t the saintly constant we dress it up to be but a mood with a short shelf life. “With a little indulgence” is the tell. He’s not blaming love for failing; he’s blaming us for getting comfortable, for letting affection calcify into habit. Indulgence here isn’t pleasure, it’s complacency - the quiet assumption that warmth will maintain itself without attention. From there, love doesn’t merely cool. It curdles into “indifference or disgust,” two outcomes that feel less like opposites than neighboring rooms in the same house.

Then Hazlitt pivots to the provocation: “hatred alone is immortal.” As a Romantic-era critic (and a famously sharp, combative one), he’s diagnosing the emotional economy of modern life: negativity is sticky, self-renewing, and socially useful. Hatred can be rehearsed, nursed, shared; it supplies narrative, identity, and a reason to stay awake. Love asks for upkeep and vulnerability. Hatred offers certainty.

The subtext is as much about politics and taste as romance. Hazlitt wrote amid partisan volatility and cultural factionalism, when public life was increasingly organized around enemies. The sentence flatters no one: if love dies of neglect, hatred survives on attention. It’s not that hatred is stronger; it’s that it’s easier to keep fed.