Art & Creativity Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line slices through the performance anxiety that usually clings to “pleasing” and swaps it for something almost suspiciously simple: enjoyment is contagious. Coming from a critic, it’s also a professional confession. He’s arguing that the most persuasive charm isn’t strategy, flattery, or social polish; it’s the visible evidence of a mind actually engaged. If you are genuinely pleased - by a conversation, a book, a room, a person - you stop grasping for approval and start generating it.

The subtext is quietly combative: people who obsess over being liked become tedious because they’re always watching themselves. Hazlitt’s critics’ eye is trained on self-consciousness as a kind of social toxin. “Being pleased” here isn’t shallow cheerfulness; it’s receptivity, the capacity to be moved. It implies attention rather than ego, appetite rather than calculation. That’s why it works rhetorically: it flatters the reader with a path to influence that’s moralized as authenticity, not manipulation.

Context matters. Hazlitt wrote in the Romantic wake, when sincerity and intensity were being rebranded as virtues against stiff Enlightenment decorum and aristocratic manners. Yet he’s too clear-eyed to romanticize innocence. The line lands because it doubles as advice and critique: the quickest way to become interesting is to be interested, and the quickest way to stop being insufferable is to stop auditioning. In a culture built on curating likability, Hazlitt’s maxim reads less like etiquette than like sabotage.