William Hazlitt Quotes
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Those who can command themselves command others.
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None but those who are happy in themselves can make others so.
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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.
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The same reason makes a man a religious enthusiast that makes a man an enthusiast in any other way ... an uncomfortable mind in an uncomfortable body.
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The more a man writes, the more he can write.
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The best kind of conversation is that which may be called thinking aloud.
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He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.
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Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities we possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.
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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.
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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.
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The multitude who require to be led, still hate their leaders.
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Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.
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The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.
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The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
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A man who is determined never to move out of the beaten road cannot lose his way.
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He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to an end of his wealth.
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Rules and models destroy genius and art.
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The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.
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Painters... are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own minds.
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Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.
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Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
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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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The slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion.
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The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.