Love Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt draws a clean line through a mess most people prefer to keep blurry: you can be well-informed and still be morally incompetent. As a critic by trade, he knew the temptations of the “head” intimately - the neatness of argument, the smug satisfaction of being correct on paper. The first clause flatters the Enlightenment faith in cognition, then quietly demotes it. Knowledge sits; wisdom lives. One is storage, the other is orientation.

The real bite is in the final sentence, where Hazlitt turns judgment from a purely rational procedure into an affective one. “We are sure to judge wrong” isn’t a gentle caution; it’s an indictment. If your feelings are distorted - by resentment, vanity, tribal loyalty, self-interest - your reasoning becomes a high-powered tool for arriving at bad conclusions with impressive confidence. The subtext is that cold objectivity, when treated as a virtue in itself, can become a kind of ethical alibi.

Context matters: Hazlitt writes in the wake of revolutionary ideals curdling into reaction and repression, and amid British Romanticism’s insistence that inner life is not ornamental but politically and socially consequential. His critical project often defended sincerity against cant: the public performance of virtue unmoored from genuine sympathy. “Feel right” doesn’t mean indulge every impulse; it means cultivate the emotional equipment that makes fairness possible - empathy, proportion, the ability to be moved by someone else’s reality. In Hazlitt’s hands, wisdom is less about IQ than about moral calibration.