William Hazlitt Quotes
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We are not satisfied to be right, unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
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The soil of friendship is worn out with constant use. Habit may still attach us to each other, but we feel ourselves fettered by it. Old friends might be compared to old married people without the tie of children.
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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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The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
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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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To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
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There is evil poured upon the earth from the overflowings of corruption-- Sickness, and poverty, and pain, and guilt, and madness, and sorrow; But, as the water from a fountain riseth and sinketh to its level, Ceaselessly toileth justice to equalize the lots of men.
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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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If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
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Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.
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Wit is, in fact, the eloquence of indifference.
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Time,--the most independent of all things.
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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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The soul of dispatch is decision.
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Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence.
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Envy is the deformed and distorted offspring of egotism; and when we reflect on the strange and disproportioned character of the parent, we cannot wonder at the perversity and waywardness of the child.
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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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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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It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices. The great difficulty in philosophy is to come to every question with a mind fresh and unshackled by former theories, though strengthened by exercise and information.
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Envy is littleness of soul.
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True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
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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.