William Hazlitt Quotes
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I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
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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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Malice often takes the garb 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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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.
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Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.
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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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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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People of genius do not excel in any profession because they work in it, they work in it because they excel.
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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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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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Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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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 severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
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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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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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Success in business is seldom owing to uncommon talents or original power which is untractable and self-willed, but to the greatest degree of commonplace capacity.
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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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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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There are some persons who never succeed from being too indolent to undertake anything; and others who regularly fail, because the instant they find success in their power, they grow indifferent, and give over the attempt.
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No really great man ever thought himself so.
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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.