William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.
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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.
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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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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
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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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He who lives wisely to himself and his own heart looks at the busy world through the loopholes of retreat, and does not want to mingle in the fray.
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A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
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Vanity does not refer to the opinion a man entertains of himself, but to that which he wishes others to entertain of him.
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Well I've had a happy life.
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The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.
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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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A wise traveler never despises his own country.
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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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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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We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a union by all the intolerance in the world. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.
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The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.
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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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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
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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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A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.
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So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.