Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Admiration thrives on distance: the shimmer of the untested, the carefully framed, the partly unknown. Hazlitt, a critic by trade and temperament, knows that intimacy is a solvent. He’s not making the tired claim that knowing someone makes you hate them; he’s making the subtler, more accurate one that repetition dulls the blade. The line’s quiet cruelty is in “the edge”: admiration isn’t a warm bath, it’s a sharp sensation, an aesthetic thrill that depends on contrast, rarity, and the sense that something exceeds your grasp.

As a Romantic-era essayist, Hazlitt is writing in a culture newly obsessed with personality, genius, and taste - and also newly suspicious of idols. His own work circles the problem of how we value art and people without turning them into saints. The subtext is almost professional self-justification: critics, lovers, audiences all participate in a cycle where first impressions inflate, and sustained exposure normalizes. The point isn’t to scold the admirer but to diagnose the mechanism: once you see the seams, the pose, the daily habits, you can still respect the object, even care for it, but the aura collapses into ordinary scale.

The phrasing does its work through restraint. “May not” concedes the popular proverb, then pivots to a sharper observation. “Takes off” suggests something incremental and inevitable, like wear on a coin. Hazlitt’s intent is to puncture romantic idealization without lapsing into misanthropy: disenchantment, he implies, is not bitterness; it’s the price of seeing clearly.