William Hazlitt Quotes
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I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me
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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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If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded.
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Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
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Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
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A wise traveler never despises his own country.
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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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The mind revolts against certain opinions, as the stomach rejects certain foods.
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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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The wretched are in this respect fortunate, that they have the strongest yearning after happiness; and to desire is in some sense to enjoy.
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No really great man ever thought himself so.
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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
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It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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Good temper is an estate for life.
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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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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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Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
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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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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
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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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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.