William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
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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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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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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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The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.
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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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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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Mankind are so ready to bestow their admiration on the dead, because the latter do not hear it, or because it gives no pleasure to the objects of it. Even fame is the offspring of envy.
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None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
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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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The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as if we thought our weaknesses as good as other people's virtues.
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A wise traveler never despises his own country.
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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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By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
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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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But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
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One said a tooth drawer was a kind of unconscionable trade, because his trade was nothing else but to take away those things whereby every man gets his living.
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Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
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No truly great person ever thought themselves so.
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Those who can command themselves command others.
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Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
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Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.
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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.