Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt is diagnosing the halo effect before psychologists gave it a name, and he does it with the brisk authority of someone who has watched reputations get made in drawing rooms and in print. The sentence flatters us with its poise - "shining", "lustre", "glaring" - then turns that sheen into a warning. Virtue, he implies, is rarely evaluated on its own merits. It’s curated. One admired trait becomes a portable spotlight we drag across a person’s whole character, making whatever falls under it look better than it is, and leaving whatever doesn’t conveniently in shadow.

The intent is double-edged: part aesthetic observation, part moral critique. Hazlitt isn’t only talking about people being complicated; he’s talking about how we prefer them to be simple. We want a single story - genius, kindness, courage - because it saves us the work of judgment. That’s the subtext: admiration is not neutral. It’s an appetite, and it edits.

Context matters. Hazlitt wrote in a culture obsessed with "character" as public performance, when the critic’s job was to weigh a writer’s style against their soul. As a Romantic-era essayist, he mistrusted both hypocrisy and hero-worship; he’d seen the way charisma, eloquence, or talent can launder behavior that would otherwise repel us. The line works because it’s not a sermon. It’s a mirror held at an angle: polished enough to catch the light, sharp enough to show what that light is hiding.