William Hazlitt quotes:

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  • Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!

  • Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.

  • 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.

  • A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles.

  • To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.

  • Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

  • Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.

  • The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

  • We are very much what others think of us. The reception our observations meet with gives us courage to proceed, or damps our efforts.

  • Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.

  • Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

  • 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.

  • Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

  • No truly great person ever thought themselves so.

  • Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.

  • That which is not, shall never be; that which is, shall never cease to be. To the wise, these truths are self-evident.

  • We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

  • Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

  • If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

  • To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

  • 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.

  • There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.

  • The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right.

  • The public have neither shame or gratitude.

  • The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

  • The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.

  • Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.

  • Zeal will do more than knowledge.

  • I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.

  • Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

  • Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.

  • A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.

  • Grace in women has more effect than beauty.

  • We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

  • No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

  • 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.

  • I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

  • To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

  • 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.

  • To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.

  • A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.

  • The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.

  • The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

  • 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.

  • A wise traveler never despises his own country.

  • The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.

  • A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

  • To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.

  • 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.

  • Never so sure our rapture to createAs when it touch'd the brink of all we hate."

  • The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy."

  • One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.

  • Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

  • Those people who are always improving never become great. Greatness is an eminence, the ascent to which is steep and lofty, and which a man must seize on at once by natural boldness and vigor, and not by patient, wary steps.

  • The true barbarian is he who thinks everything barbarous but his own tastes and prejudices.

  • Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.

  • The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.

  • Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.

  • A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.

  • It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.

  • The busier we are the more leisure we have.

  • The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

  • We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

  • Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.

  • We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.

  • The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

  • Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

  • Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking! ... I begin to feel, think, and be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.

  • 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.

  • We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.

  • 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

  • You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

  • When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

  • Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

  • An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself.

  • We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.

  • Dandyism is a variety of genius.

  • Dandyism is a species of genius.

  • Life is the art of being well deceived.

  • One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

  • We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

  • A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.

  • 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.

  • One said a tooth drawer was a kind of unconscionable trade, because his trade was nothing else but to take away those things whereby every man gets his living.

  • The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.

  • Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

  • A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could.

  • 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.

  • The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.

  • The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.

  • It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.

  • Wherever the Government does not emanate...from the people, the principle of the Government, the esprit de corps, the point of honour, in all those connected with it, and raised by it to privileges above the law and above humanity, will be hatred to the people.

  • 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.

  • In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason ... If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.

  • There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

  • I like a friend the better for having faults that one can talk about.

  • The person whose doors I enter with most pleasure, and quit with most regret, never did me the smallest favor.

  • A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

  • First impressions are often the truest, as we find (not infrequently) to our cost, when we have been wheedled out of them by plausible professions or studied actions. A man's look is the work of years; it is stamped on his countenance by the events of his whole life, nay, more, by the hand of nature, and it is not to be got rid of easily.

  • It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.

  • One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.

  • The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.

  • The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.

  • Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity and afraid of being overtaken

  • There cannot be a surer proof of low origin, or of an innate meanness of disposition, than to be always talking and thinking of being genteel.

  • Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.

  • A great mind is one that can forget or look beyond itself.

  • Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.

  • He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.

  • There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

  • Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

  • The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything to please himself or others.

  • The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.

  • An honest man is respected by all parties.

  • Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).

  • The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

  • There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.

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