William Hazlitt Quotes
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I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.
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It is essential to the triumph of reform that it should never succeed.
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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.
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The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.
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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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We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it. This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.
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One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.
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Hope is the best possession.
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The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.
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There is no flattery so adroit or effectual as that of implicit assent.
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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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Refinement creates beauty everywhere. It is the grossness of the spectator that discovers anything like grossness in the object.
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...greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.
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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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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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Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.
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Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
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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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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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The way to get on in the world is to be neither more nor less wise, neither better nor worse than your neighbours.
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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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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.
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Our energy is in proportion to the resistance it meets.