Love Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt slips a quiet provocation into what looks like a sentimental compliment: friendship and love aren’t just warm feelings, they’re feats of intellect. Calling them “steady” and “lasting” drags the topic out of the drawing-room and into the arena of discipline, judgment, and endurance. In a culture that often treats romance as fate and friendship as vibe, he insists these bonds are hard-won achievements - moral and cognitive at once.

The key move is his pairing of “goodness of heart” with “strength of mind.” Hazlitt, a critic by trade and a contrarian by temperament, distrusts easy virtue. He’s writing in an era of Romantic self-mythology, where sincerity could become performance and emotion could excuse volatility. By framing constancy as evidence, as “proof,” he implies a courtroom standard: affection must survive time, boredom, disagreement, and the ego’s urge to turn every relationship into self-expression.

The subtext is slightly stern. “Capable” suggests not everyone qualifies; plenty of people feel intensely and still fail at loyalty. Hazlitt’s standard makes love less like lightning and more like architecture: you need empathy, yes, but also mental steadiness - the ability to revise first impressions, to forgive without self-deception, to resist novelty’s glamour. For a critic who spent his life evaluating character in art and politics, this reads like an aesthetic principle applied to living: the finest attachments are those that can bear sustained attention.