William Hazlitt Quotes
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?
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We can scarcely hate anyone that we know.
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Rules and models destroy genius and art.
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The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.
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The soul of dispatch is decision.
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Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.
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There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
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Who likes not his business, his business likes not him.
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We had rather do anything than acknowledge the merit of another if we can help it. We cannot bear a superior or an equal. Hence ridicule is sure to prevail over truth, for the malice of mankind, thrown into the scale, gives the casting weight.
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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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The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.
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The worst old age is that of the mind.
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The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
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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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Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent themselves for a while from, the ties and objects that recall them; but we can be said only to fulfill our destiny in the place that gave us birth.
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Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
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To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
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Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
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Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
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He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
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I like a person who knows his own mind and sticks to it; who sees at once what, in given circumstances, is to be done, and does it.
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True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
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There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
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A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them