William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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The only true retirement is that of the heart; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.
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Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch.
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His hypothesis goes to this - to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it.
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Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, and you need envy no one.
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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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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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Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
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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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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
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Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
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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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If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
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Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
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No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
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Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
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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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Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them.
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Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
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There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
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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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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 thought must tell at once, or not at all.
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The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.