Education Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line lands with the brisk confidence of someone who has watched comfort make people complacent and hardship make them precise. “Prosperity is a great teacher” grants success its due: money, status, ease do educate. They show you what power can buy, how institutions bend, how quickly friends multiply when the bill is covered. Prosperity teaches fluency in the world as it is.

Then Hazlitt turns the knife: “adversity a greater.” The comparative does the real work. It implies that prosperity’s lessons are largely elective, even decorative, while adversity’s curriculum is compulsory. Misfortune doesn’t just inform; it interrogates. It reveals which beliefs were slogans, which relationships were situational, which parts of the self were propped up by luck. In Hazlitt’s critic’s sensibility, adversity functions like ruthless editing: it cuts sentimentality, trims vanity, exposes weak arguments.

The subtext is also political. Hazlitt wrote in post-Revolutionary Britain, amid economic strain, class resentment, and a tightening conservative order. For a dissenting intellectual, “prosperity” wasn’t merely personal comfort; it was a social narcotic that encouraged people to mistake stability for virtue and privilege for merit. Adversity, by contrast, forces an encounter with systems: the landlord, the employer, the state, the random cruelty of markets. It teaches not just character but clarity.

The aphorism works because it refuses self-pity and refuses triumphalism. It’s a warning to the comfortable and a grim compliment to the struggling: what you’re learning is real, and it will last.