William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
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The world judge of men by their ability in their profession, and we judge of ourselves by the same test: for it is on that on which our success in life depends.
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The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
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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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Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.
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Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.
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The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
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When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
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The incentive to ambition is the love of power.
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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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I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.
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It is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will. Whatever they hate or fear, they implicitly believe in, merely from the scope it gives to these passions.
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
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It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.
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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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Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
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Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
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You are never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered.
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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
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Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.
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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.
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He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.
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The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.