William Hazlitt Quotes
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Good temper is an estate for life.
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Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.
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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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Danger is a good teacher, and makes apt scholars. So are disgrace, defeat, exposure to immediate scorn and laughter. There is no opportunity in such cases for self-delusion, no idling time away, no being off your guard (or you must take the consequences) - neither is there any room for humour or caprice or prejudice.
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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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A wise traveler never despises his own country.
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A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.
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The great requisite for the prosperous management of ordinary business is the want of imagination.
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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Horus non numero nisi serenas (I count only the sunny hours).
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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.
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To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.
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Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
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Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.
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Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy. Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.
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An honest man is respected by all parties.
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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.
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A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
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Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else.
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A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.
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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
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The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
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Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
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When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.