Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line is a small manifesto against self-conscious performance, delivered with the brisk certainty of a critic who watched a culture learn to pose. “Manner” is doing a lot of work here: it’s not just technique, but style-as-display, the fussy awareness of how one is coming across. In a period when public taste, salons, and print culture rewarded polish, Hazlitt is warning that obsession with presentation can sterilize the very thing it tries to improve.

The intent isn’t anti-skill; it’s anti-vanity. Hazlitt assumes competence is built elsewhere - in repetition, apprenticeship, and the slow internalization of craft - and that real excellence appears when execution becomes second nature. His “cease to think” isn’t an argument for thoughtlessness but for absorption: the moment when judgment recedes and attention turns outward, toward the object, the audience, the opponent, the page. It’s the difference between a speaker monitoring their own voice and a speaker actually speaking to someone.

Subtextually, the quote jabs at the genteel fetish for “good manners” and affected refinement. A critic of Romantic-era sincerity, Hazlitt distrusts smoothness that’s too aware of itself; he prefers the alive, slightly dangerous energy of work that’s engaged rather than managed. The paradox is the point: you earn the right to stop thinking about the manner only after thinking about it for years. Mastery, in Hazlitt’s world, is when the self gets out of the way.