William Hazlitt Quotes
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
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To get others to come into our ways of thinking, we must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.
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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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Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
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But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
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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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Death puts an end to rivalship and competition. The dead can boast no advantage over us, nor can we triumph over them.
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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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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.
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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.
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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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They [corporations] feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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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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It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
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It [will-making] is the latest opportunity we have of exercising the natural perversity of the disposition. This last act of our lives seldom belies the former tenor of them for stupidity, caprice, and unmeaning spite. All that we seem to think of is to manage matters so (in settling accounts with those who are so unmannerly as to survive us) as to do as little good, and to plague and disappoint as many people, as possible.
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In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
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The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
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The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
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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.
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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.
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The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
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The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.