William Hazlitt Quotes
-
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.
-
The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.
-
We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
-
Those who can command themselves command others.
-
Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.
-
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.
-
Words are the only things that last for ever.
-
There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
-
Painting for a whole morning gives one as excellent an appetite for one's dinner, as old Abraham Tucker acquired for his by riding over Banstead Downs.
-
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.
-
It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
-
The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.
-
From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.
-
Women never reason, and therefore they are (comparatively) seldom wrong.
-
A full-dressed ecclesiastic is a sort of go-cart of divinity; an ethical automaton. A clerical prig is, in general, a very dangerous as well as contemptible character. The utmost that those who thus habitually confound their opinions and sentiments with the outside coverings of their bodies can aspire to, is a negative and neutral character, like wax-work figures, where the dress is done as much to the life as the man, and where both are respectable pieces of pasteboard, or harmless compositions of fleecy hosiery.
-
The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.
-
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.
-
Weakness has its hidden resources, as well as strength. There is a degree of folly and meanness which we cannot calculate upon, and by which we are as much liable to be foiled as by the greatest ability or courage.
-
If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
-
Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else.