William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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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.
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There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
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We can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home!
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None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
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If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
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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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Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.
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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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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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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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What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.
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The youth is better than the old age of friendship.
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The world dread nothing so much as being convinced of their errors.
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We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.
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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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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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To be wiser than other men is to be honester than they; and strength of mind is only courage to see and speak the truth.
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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.
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Reflection makes men cowards.
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There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!
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Common sense, to most people, is nothing more than their own opinions.
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We go on a journey to be free of all impediments; to leave ourselves behind much more than to get rid of others