Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt pricks a hole in the pious sales pitch: paradise, however flawlessly marketed, still might not feed the animal in us. The line is built on a delicious insult to religious consolation. “Perfect joys” sounds like a brochure phrase, all polish and no texture; “cravings of nature” drags the reader back to appetite, impulse, the body’s stubborn weather. Hazlitt isn’t merely doubting heaven. He’s doubting the kind of morality that tries to domesticate desire by postponing it.

As a Romantic-era critic with a talent for contrarian clarity, Hazlitt writes against the era’s respectable sternness. Early 19th-century Britain is thick with evangelical revivalism and middle-class self-discipline, a culture eager to convert lived want into future reward. Hazlitt’s subtext: postponement is a power move. Promising celestial compensation can function as social management - a way to keep people compliant, temperate, and grateful in the face of deprivation.

The sentence also has the critic’s ear for friction. “Heaven” represents abstraction, system, the cleaned-up version of happiness; “nature” stands for the messy particular, the local, the immediate. Hazlitt’s point isn’t that people are base. It’s that human longing is irreducible: even “perfect” bliss can be sterile if it ignores the sensory and the mortal. The deeper intent is to defend earthly experience - passion, pleasure, ambition, even restlessness - as more than a sin to be deferred. It’s a refusal to let metaphysics win an argument about what a human being actually is.