Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Success, Hazlitt implies, is a social craft before it is a moral or intellectual one. The line lands with the cool menace of a rule learned the hard way: if you want to "get on", don't outshine the room and don't embarrass it with your virtue. He frames advancement not as a reward for excellence but as a prize for calibration - the ability to match the temperature of your neighbors, to be legible and non-threatening inside whatever pecking order you inhabit.

The phrasing is the sting. "Neither more nor less wise" mocks the meritocratic fantasy that wisdom naturally rises. Too much insight reads as arrogance; too little reads as incompetence. Likewise, "neither better nor worse" collapses morality into optics. Being "better" isn't just hard; it's socially costly, because it exposes other people's compromises. Being "worse" is costly for the obvious reason. The sweet spot is mediocrity with good manners: competent enough to be useful, bland enough to be promoted.

Hazlitt writes as a critic in an England reshaped by new money, new institutions, and old class reflexes - a world where reputation, patronage, and salon politics could matter as much as talent. As a dissenter and a famously prickly observer, he knew how quickly independence becomes a career handicap. The subtext isn't "be average" so much as "understand the crowd's defensive instincts". It's a diagnosis of conformity dressed as advice, and the cynicism is the point: the world doesn't punish brilliance so much as it punishes the inconvenience brilliance creates.