William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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Those who are pleased with the fewest things know the least, as those who are pleased with everything know nothing.
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Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
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Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.
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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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Wit is the rarest quality to be met with among people of education, and the most common among the uneducated.
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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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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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Cant is the voluntary overcharging or prolongation of a real sentiment; hypocrisy is the setting up a pretension to a feeling you never had and have no wish for.
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The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
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Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite
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The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
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Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features.
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Man is an intellectual animal, and therefore an everlasting contradiction to himself. His senses centre in himself, his ideas reach to the ends of the universe; so that he is torn in pieces between the two, without a possibility of its ever being otherwise.
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The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.
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The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
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No young man ever thinks he shall die.
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Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.
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Genius only leaves behind it the monuments of its strength.
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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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Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.
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A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
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Wrong dressed out in pride, pomp, and circumstance has more attraction than abstract right.
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Time,--the most independent of all things.