William Hazlitt Quotes
-
A gentleman is one who understands and shows every mark of deference to the claims of self-love in others, and exacts it in return from them.
-
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.
-
Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.
-
Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.
-
The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.
-
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
-
The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
-
When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.
-
A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
-
If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
-
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
-
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 art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
-
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?
-
To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
-
The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
-
Words are the only things that last for ever.
-
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
-
We are thankful for good-will rather than for services, for the motive than the quantum of favor received.
-
We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.
-
The public have neither shame or gratitude.
-
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.
-
They [corporations] feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
-
A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.