William Hazlitt Quotes
-
Experience makes us wise.
-
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.
-
Faith is necessary to victory.
-
A strong passion for any object will ensure success, for the desire of the end will point out the means.
-
I am then never less alone than when alone
-
It is well there is no one without fault; for he would not have a friend in the world. He would seem to belong to s different species.
-
When we forget old friends, it is a sign we have forgotten ourselves.
-
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.
-
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.
-
We are fonder of visiting our friends in health than in sickness. We judge less favorably of their characters when any misfortune happens to them; and a lucky hit, either in business or reputation, improves even their personal appearance in our eyes.
-
Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
-
It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
-
It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.
-
Habit in most cases hardens and encrusts by taking away the keener edge of our sensations: but does it not in others quicken and refine, by giving a mechanical facility and by engrafting an acquired sense?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the color in your cheek and the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty and your animal spirits.
-
A situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
-
Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.
-
Popularity disarms envy in well-disposed minds. Those are ever the most ready to do justice to others who feel that the world has done them justice. When success has not this effect in opening the mind, it is a sign that it has been ill deserved.
-
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.
-
[Science is] the desire to know causes.
-
Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.
-
Those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left.