William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
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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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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
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A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them
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The objects that we have known in better days are the main props that sustain the weight of our affections, and give us strength to await our future lot.
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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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Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.
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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
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Any woman may act the part of a coquette successfully who has the reputation without the scruples of modesty. If a woman passes the bounds of propriety for our sakes, and throws herself unblushingly at our heads, we conclude it is either from a sudden and violent liking, or from extraordinary merit on our parts, either of which is enough to turn any man's head who has a single spark of gallantry or vanity in his composition.
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To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.
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Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
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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 Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer - that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
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Words are the only things that last for ever.
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True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.
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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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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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Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.
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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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We are not hypocrites in our sleep.
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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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The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.