William Hazlitt Quotes
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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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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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Those who object to wit are envious of it.
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The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
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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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The most violent friendships soonest wear themselves out.
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It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed every one is at a play.
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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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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 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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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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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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A knave thinks himself a fool, all the time he is not making a fool of some other person.
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A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common.
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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.
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Learning is its own exceeding great reward; and at the period of which we speak, it bore other fruits, not unworthy of it.
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Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.
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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.
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Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.
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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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The title of Ultracrepidarian critics has been given to those persons who find fault with small and insignificant details.
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To great evils we submit, we resent little provocations.
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A lively blockhead in company is a public benefit. Silence or dulness by the side of folly looks like wisdom.
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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.