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Quotes by William Hazlitt

A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.
– William Hazlitt
A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
– William Hazlitt
A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.
– William Hazlitt
A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
– William Hazlitt
A wise traveler never despises his own country.
– William Hazlitt
As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
– William Hazlitt
Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
– William Hazlitt
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
– William Hazlitt
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
– William Hazlitt
Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
– William Hazlitt
Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
– William Hazlitt
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
– William Hazlitt
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
– William Hazlitt
Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
– William Hazlitt
Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
– William Hazlitt
Fashon is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean and ambitious, precise and fantastical, all in a breath - tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
– William Hazlitt
Few things tend more to alienate friendship than a want of punctuality in our engagements. I have known the breach of a promise to dine or sup to break up more than one intimacy.
– William Hazlitt
Gallantry to women - the sure road to their favor - is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself as being able to contribute toward it.
– William Hazlitt
General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
– William Hazlitt
Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
– William Hazlitt
Good temper is an estate for life.
– William Hazlitt
Good temper is one of the greatest preservers of the features.
– William Hazlitt
Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
– William Hazlitt
Grace in women has more effect than beauty.
– William Hazlitt
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
– William Hazlitt
Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
– William Hazlitt
He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever.
– William Hazlitt
He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.
– William Hazlitt
Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
– William Hazlitt
I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
– William Hazlitt
I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.
– William Hazlitt
I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
– William Hazlitt
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
– William Hazlitt
If we wish to know the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.
– William Hazlitt
If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
– William Hazlitt
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
– William Hazlitt
It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
– William Hazlitt
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
– William Hazlitt
Learning is its own exceeding great reward.
– William Hazlitt
Life is short. Time is fleeting. Realise the Self. Purity of the heart is the gateway to God. Aspire. Renounce. Meditate. Be good; do good. Be kind; be compassionate. Inquire, know Thyself.
– William Hazlitt
Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols - it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
– William Hazlitt
Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.
– William Hazlitt
No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
– William Hazlitt
No truly great man ever thought himself so.
– William Hazlitt
No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
– William Hazlitt
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
– William Hazlitt
One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
– William Hazlitt
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
– William Hazlitt
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
– William Hazlitt
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
– William Hazlitt
Rules and models destroy genius and art.
– William Hazlitt
Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
– William Hazlitt
Some one is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke.
– William Hazlitt
Some persons make promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
– William Hazlitt
That which is not, shall never be; that which is, shall never cease to be. To the wise, these truths are self-evident.
– William Hazlitt
The are of will-making chiefly consists in baffling the importunity of expectation.
– William Hazlitt
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
– William Hazlitt
The busier we are the more leisure we have.
– William Hazlitt
The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
– William Hazlitt
The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.
– William Hazlitt
The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
– William Hazlitt
The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
– William Hazlitt
The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.
– William Hazlitt
The more we do, the more we can do.
– William Hazlitt
The most learned are often the most narrow minded.
– William Hazlitt
The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
– William Hazlitt
The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science and imposture is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
– William Hazlitt
The perfect joys of heaven do not satisfy the cravings of nature.
– William Hazlitt
The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.
– William Hazlitt
The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
– William Hazlitt
The public have neither shame or gratitude.
– William Hazlitt
The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
– William Hazlitt
The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.
– William Hazlitt
The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
– William Hazlitt
The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.
– William Hazlitt
The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
– William Hazlitt
The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
– William Hazlitt
There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
– William Hazlitt
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
– William Hazlitt
There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
– William Hazlitt
There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
– William Hazlitt
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
– William Hazlitt
They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
– William Hazlitt
Those who can command themselves command others.
– William Hazlitt
Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
– William Hazlitt
Those who speak ill of the spiritual life, Although they come and go by day, Are like the smith's bellows: They take breath but are not alive.
– William Hazlitt
Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
– William Hazlitt
To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
– William Hazlitt
To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
– William Hazlitt
To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
– William Hazlitt
We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.
– William Hazlitt
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
– William Hazlitt
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
– William Hazlitt
We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
– William Hazlitt
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
– William Hazlitt
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
– William Hazlitt
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
– William Hazlitt
Zeal will do more than knowledge.
– William Hazlitt
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
– William Hazlitt
Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
– William Hazlitt