William Hazlitt Quotes
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The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
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In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
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In some situations, if you say nothing, you are called dull; if you talk, you are thought impertinent and arrogant. It is hard to know what to do in this case. The question seems to be, whether your vanity or your prudence predominates.
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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
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Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.
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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.
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We must be doing something to be happy.
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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.
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The corpse of friendship is not worth embalming.
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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.
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The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.
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The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
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Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.
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Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch.
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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.
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A mighty stream of tendency.
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We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
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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.
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Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
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An honest man is respected by all parties.
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
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The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.