William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
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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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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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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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A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
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Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
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When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
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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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There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.
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When the imagination is continually led to the brink of vice by a system of terror and denunciations, people fling themselves over the precipice from the mere dread of falling.
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To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
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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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We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
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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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Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
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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.