Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust hatred alone is immortal.

Hazlitt’s aphorism advances a bleak psychology of the passions: affection is portrayed as contingent and perishable, easily spoiled by “indulgence” (overfamiliarity, complacency, or the satiation of desire), and liable to curdle into boredom or even revulsion. Hatred, by contrast, is cast as self-renewing—sustained by grievance, pride, and the imagination’s tendency to rehearse injuries. The sting of the line lies in its inversion of sentimental commonplaces about love’s endurance; Hazlitt suggests that negative emotions can be more stable because they feed on memory and resentment rather than on reciprocity or novelty. It reads as both moral warning and sardonic observation about human constancy.