William Hazlitt Quotes
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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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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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.
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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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A wise traveler never despises his own country.
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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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Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
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To be remembered after we are dead, is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.
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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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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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But of all footmen the lowest class is literary footmen.
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None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
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By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves.
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The confined air of a metropolis is hurtful to the minds and bodies of those who have never lived out of it. It is impure, stagnant--without breathing-space to allow a larger view of ourselves or others--and gives birth to a puny, sickly, unwholesome, and degenerate race of beings.
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Power is pleasure; and pleasure sweetens pain.
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The look of a gentleman is little else than the reflection of the looks of the world.
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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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Those who can command themselves command others.
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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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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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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.
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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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No truly great person ever thought themselves so.