William Hazlitt Quotes
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Nothing is more unjust or capricious than public opinion.
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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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No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.
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No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.
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Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
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Grace in women has more effect than beauty. We sometimes see a certain fine self-possession, an habitual voluptuousness of character, which reposes on its own sensations and derives pleasure from all around it, that is more irresistible than any other attraction. There is an air of languid enjoyment in such persons, "in their eyes, in their arms, and their hands, and their face," which robs us of ourselves, and draws us by a secret sympathy towards them.
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Without life there can be no action — no objects of pursuit — no restless desires — no tormenting passions. Hence it is that we fondly cling to it — that we dread its termination as the close, not of enjoyment, but of hope.
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Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.
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A man's reputation is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof. The throwing out [of] malicious imputations against any character leaves a stain, which no after-refutation can wipe out. To create an unfavorable impression, it is not necessary that certain things should be true, but that they have been said. The imagination is of so delicate a texture that even words wound it.
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Everything is in motion. Everything flows. Everything is vibrating.
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The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.
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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 essence of poetry is will and passion.
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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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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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When we forget old friends, it is a sign we have forgotten ourselves.
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Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.
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Faith is necessary to victory.
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I am then never less alone than when alone
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Experience makes us wise.
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Natural affection is a prejudice; for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.
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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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Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.
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Affectation is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body.