Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s jab lands because it sounds like a moral warning and a personal confession at the same time. “Reflection” is supposed to be the civilized virtue: the pause that turns impulse into judgment. He flips it into a liability. The line is short, brutal, and rhythmically final, as if hesitation itself has already lost the fight.

The intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-paralysis. Hazlitt, a critic by trade, knew the addictive comfort of thinking about action instead of taking it. “Makes” is the key verb: he treats cowardice not as a character flaw but as an outcome produced by over-analysis. Reflection doesn’t merely reveal fear; it manufactures it, multiplying contingencies until bravery looks like recklessness and desire looks like error.

The subtext is a critique of modern self-consciousness. To reflect is to split into observer and actor, and Hazlitt implies that the observer wins by default. Once you start watching yourself live, you start editing yourself in real time: measuring risk, anticipating judgment, rehearsing regret. Courage requires a kind of temporary blindness - not stupidity, but the ability to act without demanding guarantees the world can’t give.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, Hazlitt saw how lofty ideals curdled into caution, how public life rewarded prudence over conviction. For a Romantic-era critic, the line also defends feeling and immediacy against the chilly prestige of “reason.” It’s a provocation aimed at his own class: the people most likely to mistake contemplation for virtue, and to call their hesitation “wisdom.”