William Hazlitt Quotes
-
The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.
-
The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.
-
Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.
-
Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.
-
Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.
-
The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.
-
Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
-
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.
-
They [corporations] feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill.
-
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
-
Friendship is cemented by interest, vanity, or the want of amusement; it seldom implies esteem, or even mutual regard.
-
When I am in the country, I wish to vegetate like the country.
-
People do not seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but to maintain an opinion for the sake of talking.
-
But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
-
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.
-
He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.
-
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.
-
People addicted to secrecy are so without knowing why; they are not so for cause, but for secrecy's sake.
-
Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.
-
The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
-
I maintain that there is no common language or medium of understanding between people of education and without it - between those who judge of things from books or from their senses. Ignorance has so far the advantage over learning; for it can make an appeal to you from what you know; but you cannot re-act upon it through that which it is a perfect stranger to. Ignorance is, therefore, power.
-
To think justly, we must understand what others mean. To know the value of our thoughts, we must try their effect on other minds.
-
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.
-
If we are long absent from our friends, we forget them; if we are constantly with them, we despise them.