William Hazlitt Quotes
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An orator can hardly get beyond commonplaces: if he does he gets beyond his hearers.
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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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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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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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.
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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.
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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 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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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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A grave blockhead should always go about with a lively one - they show one another off to the best advantage.
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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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Many a man would have turned rogue if he knew how.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.
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Hope is the best possession.
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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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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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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.
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The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
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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.