William Hazlitt Quotes
-
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
-
When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
-
A wise traveler never despises his own country.
-
We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
-
To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
-
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.
-
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
-
The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.
-
You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
-
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?
-
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
-
The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture.
-
We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.
-
Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.
-
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
-
Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
-
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.
-
One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
-
The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
-
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.
-
Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.