William Hazlitt Quotes
-
Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
-
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.
-
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
-
A distinction has been made between acuteness and subtlety of understanding. This might be illustrated by saying that acuteness consists in taking up the points or solid atoms, subtlety in feeling the air of truth.
-
A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.
-
Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.
-
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.
-
The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.
-
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.
-
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
-
People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.
-
Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary. He may feel the gale of popularity, but he cannot tell how long it will last. His opinion of himself wants distance, wants time, wants numbers, to set it off and confirm it.
-
The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure.
-
Hope is the best possession. None are completely wretched but those who are without hope. Few are reduced so low as that.
-
One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself.
-
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
-
To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
-
A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
-
Hope is the best possession.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
-
An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
-
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.