Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line has the sting of someone who’s watched moral language get used as a toy, not a tether. “Break promises” is already a low act; the twist is “for the pleasure of breaking them,” which strips away the usual excuses (need, fear, circumstance) and replaces them with appetite. He’s not diagnosing weakness so much as a certain species of character: people who treat obligation as an opportunity to prove they’re unbound.

The intent is polemical and psychological at once. Hazlitt, a critic by trade and temperament, is always alert to the ways lofty words mask petty motives. A promise is social glue; it creates expectation, dependence, vulnerability. To break it deliberately isn’t just to disappoint, but to assert power over another person’s trust. The pleasure is sadistic in the light, but it can also be subtler: the thrill of self-dramatization (“I refuse to be held”), the ego stroke of being chased, the perverse relief of sabotaging intimacy before it makes demands.

The subtext lands on hypocrisy: the promise-maker likely enjoys the performance of sincerity, too. Hazlitt implies a double indulgence - first the credit gained by pledging, then the kick of reneging. In the Romantic-era Britain he inhabited, where reputation, patronage, and political loyalty were currency, promises weren’t merely personal; they were instruments. His sentence reads like a warning label for public life and private love alike: beware the people for whom commitment is not a bond, but a stage prop they delight in smashing.