William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
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Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
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One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
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When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.
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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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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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Those only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is, who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men.
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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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We would willingly, and without remorse, sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object.
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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.
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The truth is, we pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can.
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To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.
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We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.
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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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Genius is native to the soil where it grows — is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun — and is not a hot - house plant or an exotic.
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There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation.
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I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.
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In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling, and not from reason. If we were obliged to enter into a theoretical deliberation on every occasion before we act, life would be at a stand, and Art would be impracticable.
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If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
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The temple of fame stands upon the grave: the flame that burns upon its altars is kindled from the ashes of great men.
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Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.