William Hazlitt Quotes
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Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
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I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like, grave or gay, black, brown, or fair; with golden tresses or raven locks; - and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck.
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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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The poetical impression of any object is that uneasy, exquisite sense of beauty or power that cannot be contained within itself; that is impatient of all limit; that (as flame bends to flame) strives to link itself to some other image of kindred beauty or grandeur; to enshrine itself, as it were, in the highest forms of fancy, and to relieve the aching sense of pleasure by expressing it in the boldest manner.
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A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.
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Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singularity and vulgarity.
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A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.
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The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which, we often yield as to a resistless power; nor can he reasonably expect, the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
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A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.
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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.
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If we use no ceremony towards others, we shall be treated without any. People are soon tired of paying trifling attentions to those who receive them with coldness, and return them with neglect.
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A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
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If you think you can win, you can win. Faith is necessary to victory.
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The number of objects we see from living in a large city amuses the mind like a perpetual raree-show, without supplying it with any ideas.
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Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress.
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Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night.
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There are no rules for friendship. It must be left to itself. We cannot force it any more than love.
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Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
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To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.
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Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.