William Hazlitt Quotes
-
Old friendships are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them.
-
There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derived from inanimate things-books, pictures and the face of nature.
-
The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
-
Our opinions are not our own, but in the power of sympathy. If a person tells us a palpable falsehood, we not only dare not contradict him, but we dare hardly disbelieve him to his face. A lie boldly uttered has the effect of truth for the instant.
-
True friendship is self-love at second-hand.
-
We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
-
We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.
-
One is always more vexed at losing a game of any sort by a single hole or ace, than if one has never had a chance of winning it.
-
No young man ever thinks he shall die.
-
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.
-
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
-
We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves.
-
To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us.
-
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.
-
No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.
-
He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.
-
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?
-
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
-
The smallest pain in our little finger gives us more concern than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings.
-
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
-
We are all of us, more or less, the slaves of opinion.
-
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.
-
We do not attend to the advice of the sage and experienced because we think they are old, forgetting that they once were young and placed in the same situations as ourselves.
-
Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.