William Hazlitt Quotes
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To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
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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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We must be doing something to be happy.
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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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That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them.
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Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.
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The public have neither shame or gratitude.
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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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We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
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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 difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.
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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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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.
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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
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No really great man ever thought himself so.
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An honest man is respected by all parties.
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Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
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The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
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As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
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People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
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A thought must tell at once, or not at all.
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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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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Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.