William Hazlitt Quotes
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Those who can command themselves command others.
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None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
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The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.
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We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
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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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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.
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You shall yourself be judge. Reason, with most people, means their own opinion.
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Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.
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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.
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We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
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He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.
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Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.
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We talk little when we do not talk about ourselves.
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There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
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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.
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The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy of its malice.
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Political truth is libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
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Want of principle is power. Truth and honesty set a limit to our efforts, which impudence and hypocrisy easily overleap.
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It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
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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.
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Charity, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Next to putting it in a bank, men like to squander their superfluous wealth on those to whom it is sure to be doing the least possible good.
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From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.
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Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.
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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.