William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.
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Experience makes us wise.
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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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Great thoughts reduced to practice become great acts.
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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.
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Faith is necessary to victory.
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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 situation in a public office is secure, but laborious and mechanical, and without the great springs of life, hope and fear.
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Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.
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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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When we forget old friends, it is a sign we have forgotten ourselves.
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I am then never less alone than when alone
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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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Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.
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Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end.
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The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.
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Popularity is neither fame nor greatness.