William Hazlitt Quotes
-
People are not soured by misfortune, but by the reception they meet with in it.
-
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.
-
One truth discovered is immortal, and entitles its author to be so; for, like a new substance in nature, it cannot be destroyed.
-
We find many things to which the prohibition of them constitutes the only temptation.
-
As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.
-
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.
-
Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.
-
Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
-
Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
-
The greatest reverses of fortune are the most easily borne from a sort of dignity belonging to them.
-
The insolence of the vulgar is in proportion to their ignorance. They treat everything with contempt which they do not understand.
-
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.
-
Keep your misfortunes to yourself.
-
Despair swallows up cowardice.
-
Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
-
He who does nothing renders himself incapable of doing any thing; but while we are executing any work, we are preparing and qualifying ourselves to undertake another.
-
Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.
-
Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy.
-
Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
-
The most phlegmatic dispositions often contain the most inflammable spirits, as fire is struck from the hardest flints.
-
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.
-
You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
-
There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body.
-
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!