William Hazlitt Quotes
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To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.
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It might be argued, that to be a knave is the gift of fortune, but to play the fool to advantage it is necessary to be a learned man.
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Elegance is something more than ease; it is more than a freedom from awkwardness or restraint. It implies, I conceive, a precision, a polish, a sparkling, spirited yet delicate.
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Books wind into the heart.
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A really great man has always an idea of something greater than himself.
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Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
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Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
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The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up.
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If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
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One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.
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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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Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
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Do not quarrel with the world too soon; for, bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in, here. If railing would have made it better, it would have been reformed long ago.
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There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.
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Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
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Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.
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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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Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.
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We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
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True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors softened, and where we may fancy our opinion of ourselves confirmed by an impartial and faithful witness.
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Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
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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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We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.
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Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features.