William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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We prefer ourselves to others, only because we a have more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person's.
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The essence of poetry is will and passion.
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It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
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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
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It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.
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Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.
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By conversing with the mighty dead, we imbibe sentiment with knowledge. We become strongly attached to those who can no longer either hurt or serve us, except through the influence which they exert over the mind. We feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages.
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Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people's weaknesses.
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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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Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.
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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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Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
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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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Men of gravity are intellectual stammerers, whose thoughts move slowly.
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I am then never less alone than when alone
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The soul of dispatch is decision.
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We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.
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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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No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.
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True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
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Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.
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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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Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.