William Hazlitt Quotes
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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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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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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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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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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We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.
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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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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 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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Well I've had a happy life.
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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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Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs. The heaviest charge we can bring against the general texture of society is that it is commonplace. Our fancied superiority to others is in some one thing which we think most of because we excel in it, or have paid most attention to it; whilst we overlook their superiority to us in something else which they set equal and exclusive store by.
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The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
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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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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
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A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
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Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood.
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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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The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.
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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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If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.
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The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
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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.