“Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.” – William Hazlitt
English essayist William Hazlitt wrote this quote as one of the most honest essayists in the English language. He wrote it because it was uncomfortable but true. The sentence does not offer resolution. It offers recognition. And for many people, being recognised accurately in their struggle is more useful than being offered a comfort that does not hold up under examination.
What It Means
The quote describes the fundamental condition of human ambition. People do not primarily strive toward what they already are. They strive toward what they are not yet. They want to become a better version, a more capable version, a version that can do things the current version cannot. That gap between what you are and what you are reaching toward is not a problem to be solved. It is the defining structure of a conscious .
The word “continued” is the most important word in the sentence. Hazlitt is not describing a temporary condition that resolves once you achieve a certain level of competence or success. He is describing something permanent. The struggle does not end when you close one gap, because closing that gap reveals the next one. The person who achieves what they once thought impossible immediately discovers a new frontier of what remains impossible. The horizon moves with you. It always has.
There is something that could be read as bleak in this observation. But that reading misses what Hazlitt is actually doing. He is not lamenting the human condition. He is mapping it accurately. The struggle he describes is not a punishment. It is the engine. It is the thing that keeps a conscious person moving, growing, and reaching past the boundaries of their current self. A life without that struggle would not be a life of achieved peace. It would be a life of stagnation dressed up as contentment.
The second half of the , “to do what we cannot”, extends the point into the domain of capability rather than identity. We do not only reach toward being something different. We reach toward doing things that are currently beyond us. Every serious creative, professional, or athletic pursuit contains this element. You are always at the leading edge of your work, attempting something you have not yet proven you can do. That is not a failure of preparation. That is what genuine effort looks like from the inside.
Where It Comes From
William Hazlitt was born on April 10, 1778, in Maidstone, Kent, England. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest essayists in the history of the English language. His work covered an extraordinary range — art criticism, literary criticism, political philosophy, psychological observation, and personal memoir. He wrote with a directness and an intellectual honesty that made him both admired and deeply unpopular during his lifetime.
Hazlitt was a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and of Napoleon Bonaparte, positions that put him sharply at odds with much of the English literary establishment of his era. He lost friendships over his convictions and was attacked repeatedly in the press. His personal life was marked by unrequited love, financial difficulty, and social isolation. He knew what it meant to struggle toward something that would not yield.
He died on September 18, 1830, in London, reportedly saying on his deathbed that he had had a happy life. That claim, given everything the biographical record shows, is itself a kind of testament to the philosophy his quote expresses. The struggle, for Hazlitt, was not opposed to happiness. It was inseparable from it. He died still reaching, still engaged with the gap between what he was and what he might yet become.
His essays were not widely celebrated during his lifetime at the level they deserved. Recognition came later, as it so often does for writers who tell the truth more directly than their contemporaries are ready to hear. Today he is regarded as a foundational figure in the essay form and a writer whose psychological observations anticipate much of what the twentieth century would eventually formalise in the language of philosophy and psychology.
How to Apply It Today
Takeaway 1: Stop interpreting the persistence of the struggle as evidence that something has gone wrong. Most people carry a background assumption that the struggle is supposed to end at some point. They assume that there is a level of achievement or self-development beyond which the reaching stops and the having begins. Hazlitt’s quote dismantles that assumption directly.
Takeaway 2: Recognise the reaching itself as the substance of a meaningful life. The gap between what you are and what you are not yet is not empty space. It is the space where your most important work happens. Every attempt to close that gap is an act of genuine engagement with your own life. The person who is not struggling toward anything they cannot yet do has not achieved peace.
Takeaway 3: Extend compassion to others by applying Hazlitt’s framework to their behaviour. Everyone around you is engaged in their own version of this continued struggle. They are also trying to be what they are not and to do what they cannot.
Related Readings
Table Talk by William Hazlitt
This is the collection that contains some of Hazlitt’s most direct and personal essays on ambition, character, and the human relationship with struggle. Reading it alongside the quote gives the line its fullest original context and demonstrates how consistently this theme ran through his thinking.
The Myth of Sisyphus by
Camus takes the image of endless, unresolvable struggle and argues that it is the precise condition of a meaningful human life rather than a punishment. His conclusion is the philosophical companion to Hazlitt’s psychological observation.
Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow
Maslow’s exploration of self-actualisation describes the same permanent reaching that Hazlitt names. His finding that genuinely self-actualising people are characterised by a continued orientation toward growth rather than a state of achieved completion gives Hazlitt’s claim its most rigorous psychological grounding.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke’s letters to a struggling young writer address the experience of reaching toward what you cannot yet do with more tenderness and precision than almost anything else in the literary canon. They are the most humane companion to Hazlitt’s unflinching observation.
