William Hazlitt Quotes
-
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
-
The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.
-
But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
-
You are never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
-
The truly proud man knows neither superiors or inferiors. The first he does not admit of - the last he does not concern himself about.
-
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
-
The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
-
There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene.".
-
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.
-
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
-
Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
-
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
-
Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
-
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
-
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
-
You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
-
It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.
-
The look of a gentleman is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world.
-
A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary.
-
Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite