William Hazlitt Quotes
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We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.
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A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.
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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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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.
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Hope is the best possession.
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There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
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Do not keep on with a mockery of friendship after the substance is gone - but part, while you can part friends. Bury the carcass of friendship: it is not worth embalming.
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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
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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 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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Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
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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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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 silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.
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An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
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Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
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What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.
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The expression of a gentleman's face is not so much that of refinement, as of flexibility, not of sensibility and enthusiasm as of indifference; it argues presence of mind rather than enlargement of ideas.
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Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.
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It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.
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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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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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To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.