William Hazlitt Quotes
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We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
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Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.
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As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
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The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.
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A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue. Should she prove vicious, she makes vice lovely in his eyes.
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Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.
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Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
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People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.
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There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you.
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Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
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Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.
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Truth from the mouth of an honest man and severity from a good-natured man have a double effect.
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When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.
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Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
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Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
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The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
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There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
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People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
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Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.
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Despair swallows up cowardice.
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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets. We attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter, we persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them.
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Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
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The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.
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Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.