William Hazlitt Quotes
-
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.
-
Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen channel.
-
To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.
-
A woman's vanity is interested in making the object of her choice the god of her idolatry.
-
I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.
-
There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
-
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.
-
Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
-
Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
-
He who would see old Hoghton right Must view it by the pale moonlight.
-
Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
-
To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
-
A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.
-
The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
-
Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
-
Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
-
It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
-
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.
-
Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.