William Hazlitt Quotes
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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Good temper is an estate for life.
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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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Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.
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It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.
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We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.
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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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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
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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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Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others, who feel that the world has done them justice.
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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 art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
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Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
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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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We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
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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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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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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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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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No really great man ever thought himself so.
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Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.
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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.