William Hazlitt Quotes
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Love may turn to indifference with possession.
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Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.
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Love and joy are twins or born of each other.
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Lying is the strongest acknowledgement of the force of truth.
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The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetness and cement of friendship.
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It is better to drink of deep grief than to taste shallow pleasures.
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When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
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An accomplished coquette excites the passions of others, in proportion as she feels none herself.
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The best way to make ourselves agreeable to others is by seeming to think them so. If we appear fully sensible of their good qualities they will not complain of the want of them in us.
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Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
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The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.
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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?
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There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.
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As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect.
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While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.
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It is a false principle that because we are entirely occupied with ourselves, we must equally occupy the thoughts of others. The contrary inference is the fair one.
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The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.
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What are the publications that succeed? Those that pretend to teach the public that the persons they have been accustomed unwittingly to look up to as the lights of the earth are no better than themselves.
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That which is not, shall never be; that which is, shall never cease to be. To the wise, these truths are self-evident.
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Zeal will do more than knowledge.
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To impress the idea of power on others, they must be made in some way to feel it.
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The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.
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We are governed by sympathy; and the extent of our sympathy is determined by that of our sensibility
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We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.