Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Hazlitt

Happiness, Hazlitt insists, is less a mood than a discipline of honesty: stop trying to outsmart biology, time, and temperament. The line lands with the brisk authority of a critic who spent his life watching people perform versions of themselves for applause. "True to nature" sounds pastoral until you notice the edge in it. Hazlitt isn’t romanticizing the countryside; he’s warning against self-deception, the social kind that turns desire into a costume and aging into a scandal.

The kicker is "carry our age along with us". Age here isn’t a number to be managed but a companion you either acknowledge or drag, resentfully, behind you. Hazlitt’s subtext is that the modern self is always tempted to live in bad faith: to treat youth as moral capital, to measure worth by freshness, to keep remaking the persona so the mirror stays flattering. He frames acceptance as forward motion, not resignation. You "carry" age the way you carry experience: integrated, visible, useful.

Context matters. Writing in the early 19th century, Hazlitt sits at the hinge between Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic self-fashioning, when sincerity was becoming a cultural fetish and public identity was increasingly performative (in salons, in print, in politics). His intent is quietly polemical: against vanity, against nostalgia, against the fantasy that happiness is a loophole in the human condition. The sentence works because it refuses the usual consolations. It offers no glow, just a clean bargain: peace comes when you stop trying to subtract yourself from time.