William Hazlitt Quotes
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An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.
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One said he wondered that leather was not dearer than any other thing. Being demanded a reason: because, saith he, it is more stood upon than any other thing in the world.
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You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.
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Diffidence and awkwardness are antidotes to love.
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Sincerity has to do with the connexion between our words and thoughts, and not between our beliefs and actions.
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Poverty is the test of civility and the touchstone of friendship.
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We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
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I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
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People try to reconcile you to a disappointment in love by asking why you should cherish a passion for an object that has proved itself worthless. Had you known this before, you would not have encouraged the passion; but that having been once formed, knowledge does not destroy it. If we have drank poison, finding it out does not prevent its being in our veins: so passion leaves its poison in the mind!
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We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.
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Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.
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Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
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I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
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The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.
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To the proud the slightest repulse or disappointment is the last indignity.
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The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
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Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.
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Fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive egotism ... tied to no rule, and bound to conform to every whim of the minute.
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Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
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Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
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The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
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An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
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Humour is the making others act or talk absurdly and unconsciously; wit is the pointing out and ridiculing that absurdity consciously, and with more or less ill-nature.