William Hazlitt Quotes
-
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
-
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.
-
When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
-
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
-
A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions.
-
You are never tired of painting, because you have to set down not what you know already, but what you have just discovered.
-
An honest man is respected by all parties.
-
Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.
-
If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.
-
Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.
-
Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.
-
Confidence gives a fool the advantage over a wise man.
-
By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
-
There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.
-
Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
-
Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
-
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
-
Reflection brakes men cowards. There is no object that can be put in competition with life, unless it is viewed through the medium of passion, and we are hurried away by the impulse of the moment.
-
The love of letters is the forlorn hope of the man of letters. His ruling passion is the love of fame.
-
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.
-
The more we do, the more we can do.
-
They [corporations] feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
-
We go on a journey to be free of all impediments; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others
-
You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.