William Hazlitt Quotes
-
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
-
To give a reason for anything is to breed a doubt of it.
-
The multitude who require to be led, still hate their leaders.
-
The soul of dispatch is decision.
-
We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
-
We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.
-
Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
-
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.
-
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
-
To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.
-
The seat of knowledge is in the head; of wisdom, in the heart. We are sure to judge wrong, if we do not feel right.
-
Good temper is one of the great preservers of the features.
-
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
-
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.
-
With women, the great business of life is love; and they generally make a mistake in it. They consult neither the heart nor the head, but are led away by mere humour and fancy. If instead of a companion for life, they had to choose a partner in a country-dance or to trifle away an hour with, their mode of calculation would be right. They tie their true-lover's knot with idle, thoughtless haste, while the institutions of society render it indissoluble.
-
To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.
-
Whatever interests is interesting.
-
Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
-
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 humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
-
A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.