Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Friendship, in Hazlitt's hands, gets yanked off its pedestal and dropped into the messy marketplace of ego. The sting of the line is its deliberate downgrade: a friend selected like a mistress, not for virtue or depth, but for the small accidents of timing and attention that make us feel enlarged. Hazlitt isn't merely being scandalous. He's arguing that what we praise as discernment is often a self-serving reflex: we gravitate toward whoever mirrors back the version of ourselves we most want to believe.

The phrasing does a lot of covert work. "Often" is a hedge that makes the accusation harder to dismiss; he isn't condemning all friendship, just exposing its common corruption. "No particular excellence" punctures the comforting story that our attachments are meritocratic. Then comes the real engine: "some circumstance". It's the shrug that lands the blow. A shared enemy, a well-timed compliment, a moment of vulnerability, a social convenience - suddenly we call it loyalty.

Context matters: Hazlitt, a Romantic-era critic with a talent for unsparing psychological portraiture, is writing against the era's sentimental idealizations. He's not rejecting feeling; he's suspicious of the way feeling recruits morality as PR. The subtext is bleakly modern: intimacy can be less about seeing another person clearly than about securing a flattering audience. The line endures because it makes a private fear sound like social diagnosis: that our friendships might be less chosen than curated, assembled around the quiet need to keep self-love well fed.