William Hazlitt Quotes
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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.
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The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.
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If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.
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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
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Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
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I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me
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The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
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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.
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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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There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.
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If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.
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The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.
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Words are the only things that last for ever.
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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
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Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.
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By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
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To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
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Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
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The worst old age is that of the mind.
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A thought must tell at once, or not at all.