Life & Mortality Quote by William Hazlitt

Posterity is a lousy HR department. Hazlitt’s line lands because it punctures the cheap consolation prize so often handed to artists, thinkers, and inconvenient truth-tellers: you may be ignored, mocked, or starved now, but don’t worry, history will thank you later. He refuses the bargain. “Poor recompense” turns the whole mythology of delayed recognition into a kind of moral fraud, as if esteem can be back-paid when the person who earned it is no longer around to spend it.

The intent is pointedly social, not merely personal. Hazlitt wrote as a critic in an England that prized “respectability” and punished dissent with ostracism. He knew the machinery of contempt: the clubbiness of institutions, the way reputations are made through sneers as much as through arguments, the pleasure a culture takes in belittling anyone who won’t flatter its powers. The quote isn’t romantic self-pity; it’s a rebuke to audiences and gatekeepers who outsource their conscience to the future.

Subtext: admiration after death is often a way for the living to absolve themselves. When we canonize the dead, we can perform virtue without taking any risk. Hazlitt is asking for something more difficult and more ethical: dignity in real time. The line also warns creators against the seductive narcotic of legacy-thinking. If you endure contempt now by fantasizing about memorial plaques later, you’ve let your enemies define the terms of your life.

It works because it sounds like common sense while quietly indicting an entire culture of retrospective praise. The sting is simple: what good is a halo when you’ve already been crucified?